WORK AMONG THE DEAD.
It is one of the many evils resulting from the absurdly erroneous
teaching as to conditions after death which is unfortunately current in
our western world, that those who have recently shaken off this mortal
coil are usually much puzzled and often very seriously frightened at
finding everything so different from what their religion had led them
to expect. The mental attitude of a large number of such people was
pithily voiced the other day by an English general, who three days
after his death met one of the band of helpers whom he had known in
physical life. After expressing his great relief that he had at last
found some one with whom he was able to communicate, his first remark
was: “But if I am dead, where am I? For if this is heaven I don’t think
much of it; and if it is hell, it is better than I expected.”
But unfortunately a far greater number take things less philosophically.
They have been taught that all men are destined to eternal flames except
a favoured few who are superhumanly good; and since a very small amount
of self-examination convinces them that they do not belong to _that_
category, they are but too often in a condition of panic terror,
dreading every moment that the new world in which they find themselves
may dissolve and drop them into the clutches of the devil, in whom they
have been sedulously taught to believe. In many cases they spend long
periods of acute mental suffering before they can free themselves from
the fatal influence of this blasphemous doctrine of everlasting
punishment--before they can realize that the world is governed, not
according to the caprice of a hideous demon who gloats over human
anguish, but according to a benevolent and wonderfully patient law of
evolution, which is absolutely just indeed, but yet again and again
offers to man opportunities of progress, if he will but take them, at
every stage of his career.
It ought in fairness to be mentioned that it is only among what are
called protestant communities that this terrible evil assumes its most
aggravated form. The great Roman Catholic Church, with its doctrine of
purgatory, approaches much more nearly to a conception of the astral
plane, and its devout members at any rate realize that the state in
which they find themselves shortly after death is merely a temporary
one, and that it is their business to endeavour to raise themselves
out of it as soon as may be by intense spiritual aspiration, while
they accept any suffering which may come to them as necessary for the
wearing away of the imperfections in their character before they can
pass to higher and brighter regions.
It will thus be seen that there is plenty of work for the helpers to do
among the newly dead, for in the vast majority of cases they need to be
calmed and reassured, to be comforted and instructed. In the astral,
just as in the physical world, there are many who are but little
disposed to take advice from those who know better than they; yet the
very strangeness of the conditions surrounding them renders many of the
dead willing to accept the guidance of those to whom these conditions
are obviously familiar; and many a man’s stay on that plane has been
considerably shortened by the earnest efforts of this band of energetic
workers.
Not, be it understood, that the karma of the dead man can in any way be
interfered with; he has built for himself during life an astral body
of a certain degree of density, and until that body is sufficiently
dissolved he cannot pass on into the heaven-world beyond; but he need
not lengthen the period necessary for that process by adopting an
improper attitude.
All students ought clearly to grasp the truth that the length of
a man’s astral life after he has put off his physical body depends
mainly upon two factors--the nature of his past physical life, and
his attitude of mind after what we call death. During his earth-life
he is constantly influencing the building of matter into his astral
body. He affects it directly by the passions, emotions, and desires
which he allows to hold sway over him; he affects it indirectly by the
action upon it of his thoughts from above, and of the details of his
physical life--his continence or his debauchery, his cleanliness or his
uncleanliness, his food and his drink--from below.
If by persistence in perversity along any of these lines he is so
stupid as to build for himself a coarse and gross astral vehicle,
habituated to responding only to the lower vibrations of the plane, he
will find himself after death bound to that plane during a long and
slow process of that body’s disintegration. On the other hand if by
decent and careful living he gives himself a vehicle mainly composed of
finer material, he will have very much less _post-mortem_ trouble
and discomfort, and his evolution will proceed much more rapidly and
easily.
This much is generally understood, but the second great factor--his
attitude of mind after death--seems often to be forgotten. The
desirable thing is for him to realize his position on this particular
little arc of his evolution--to learn that he is at this stage
withdrawing steadily inward towards the plane of the true ego, and
that consequently it is his business to disengage his thoughts as far
as may be from things physical, and to fix his attention more and more
upon those spiritual matters which will occupy him during his life in
the heaven-world. By doing this he will greatly facilitate the natural
astral disintegration, and will avoid the sadly common mistake of
unnecessarily delaying himself upon the lower levels of what should be
so temporary a residence.
But many of the dead very considerably retard the process of
dissolution by clinging passionately to the earth which they have left;
they simply will not turn their thoughts and desires upward, but spend
their time in struggling with all their might to keep in full touch
with the physical plane, thus causing great trouble to any one who may
be trying to help them. Earthly matters are the only ones in which
they have ever had any living interest, and they cling to them with
desperate tenacity even after death. Naturally as time passes on they
find it increasingly difficult to keep hold of things down here, but
instead of welcoming and encouraging this process of gradual refinement
and spiritualization they resist it vigorously by every means in their
power.
Of course the mighty force of evolution is eventually too strong for
them, and they are swept on in its beneficent current, yet they fight
every step of the way, thereby not only causing themselves a vast
amount of entirely unnecessary pain and sorrow, but also very seriously
delaying their upward progress and prolonging their stay in astral
regions to an almost indefinite extent. In convincing them that this
ignorant and disastrous opposition to the cosmic will is contrary to
the laws of nature, and persuading them to adopt an attitude of mind
which is the exact reversal of it, lies a great part of the work of
those who are trying to help.
It happens occasionally that the dead are earth-bound by
anxiety--anxiety sometimes about duties unperformed or debts
undischarged, but more often on account of wife or children left
unprovided for. In such cases as this it has more than once been
necessary, before the dead man was satisfied to pursue his upward
path in peace, that the helper should to some extent act as his
representative upon the physical plane, and attend on his behalf to the
settlement of the business which was troubling him. An illustration
taken from our recent experience will perhaps make this clearer.
One of the band of pupils was trying to assist a poor man who had died
in one of our western cities, but found it impossible to withdraw
his mind from earthly things because of his anxiety about two young
children whom his death had left without means of support. He had been
a working man of some sort, and had been unable to lay by any money for
them; his wife had died some two years previously and his landlady,
though exceedingly kind-hearted and very willing to do anything in her
power for them, was herself far too poor to be able to adopt them, and
very reluctantly came to the conclusion that she would be obliged to
hand them over to the parish authorities. This was a great grief to the
dead father, though he could not blame the landlady, and was himself
unable to suggest any other course.
Our friend asked him whether he had no relative to whom he could
entrust them, but the father knew of none. He had a younger brother,
he said, who would certainly have done something for him in this
extremity, but he had lost sight of him for fifteen years, and did not
even know whether he was living or dead. When last heard of he had been
apprenticed to a carpenter in the north, and he was then described as a
steady young fellow who, if he lived, would surely get on.
The clues at hand were certainly very slight, but since there seemed no
other prospect of help for the children, our friend thought it worth
while to make a special effort to follow them up. Taking the dead
man with him he commenced a patient search after the brother in the
town indicated; and after a great deal of trouble they were actually
successful in finding him. He was now a master carpenter in a fairly
flourishing way of business--married, but without children though
earnestly desiring them, and therefore apparently just the man for the
emergency.
The question now was how the information could best be conveyed to
this brother. Fortunately he was found to be so far impressionable
that the circumstances of his brother’s death and the destitution of
his children could be put vividly before him in a dream, and this was
repeated three times, the place and even the name of the landlady
being clearly indicated to him. He was immensely impressed by this
recurring vision, and discussed it earnestly with his wife, who advised
him to write to the address given. This he did not like to do, but
was strongly inclined to travel down into the west country, find out
whether there was such a house as that which he had seen, and if so
make some excuse to call there. He was a busy man, however, and he
finally decided that he could not afford to lose a day’s work for what
after all might well prove to be nothing but the baseless fabric of a
dream.
The attempt along these lines having apparently failed, it was
determined to try another method, so one of the helpers wrote a letter
to the man detailing the circumstances of his brother’s death and the
position of the children, exactly as he had seen them in his dream. On
receipt of this confirmation he no longer hesitated, but set off the
very next day for the town indicated, and was received with open arms
by the kind-hearted landlady. It had been easy enough for the helpers
to persuade her, good soul that she was, to keep the children with her
for a few days on the chance that something or other would turn up for
them, and she has ever since congratulated herself that she did so. The
carpenter of course took the children back with him and provided them
with a happy home, and the dead father, now no longer anxious, passed
rejoicing on his upward way.
Since some Theosophical writers have felt it their duty to insist in
vigorous terms upon the evils so frequently attendant upon the holding
of spiritualistic séances, it is only fair to admit that on several
occasions good work similar to that of the helper in the case just
described has been done through the agency of a medium or of some one
present at a circle. Thus, though spiritualism has too often detained
souls who but for it would have attained speedier liberation, it must
be set to the credit of its account that it has also furnished the
means of escape to others, and thus opened up the path of advancement
for them. There have been instances in which the defunct has been
able to appear unassisted to his relatives or friends and explain his
wishes to them; but these are naturally rare, and most souls who are
earth-bound by anxieties of the kind indicated can satisfy themselves
only by means of the services of the medium or the conscious helper.
Another case very frequently encountered on the astral plane is that of
the man who cannot believe that he is dead at all. Indeed, most people
consider the very fact that they are still conscious to be an absolute
proof that they have not passed through the portals of death; somewhat
of a satire this, if one thinks of it, on the practical value of our
much-vaunted belief in the immortality of the soul! However they may
have labelled themselves during life, the great majority of those who
die, in this country at any rate, show themselves by their subsequent
attitude to have been to all intents and purposes materialists at
heart; and those who on earth have honestly called themselves so are
often no more difficult to deal with than others who would have been
shocked at the very name.
A very recent instance was that of a scientific man who, finding
himself fully conscious, and yet under conditions differing radically
from any that he had ever experienced before, had persuaded himself
that he was still alive, and merely the victim of a prolonged and
unpleasant dream. Fortunately for him there happened to be among the
band of those able to function upon the astral plane a son of an old
friend of his, a young man whose father had commissioned him to search
for the departed scientist and endeavour to render him some assistance.
When after some trouble the youth found and accosted him, he frankly
admitted that he was in a condition of great bewilderment and
discomfort, but still clung desperately to his dream hypothesis as on
the whole the most probable explanation of what he saw, and even went
so far as to suggest that his visitor was nothing but a dream-figure
himself!
At last, however, he so far gave way as to propose a kind of test, and
said to the young man, “If you are, as you assert, a living person, and
the son of my old friend, bring me from him some message that shall
prove to me your objective reality.” Now although under all ordinary
conditions of the physical plane the giving of any kind of phenomenal
proof is strictly forbidden to the pupils of the Masters, it seemed as
though a case of this kind hardly came under the rules; and therefore,
when it had been ascertained that there was no objection on the part
of higher authorities, an application was made to the father, who at
once sent a message referring to a series of events which had occurred
before the son’s birth. This convinced the dead man of the real
existence of his young friend, and therefore of the plane upon which
they were both functioning; and as soon as he felt this established,
his scientific training at once reasserted itself, and he became
exceeding eager to acquire all possible information about this new
region.
Of course the message which he so readily accepted as evidence was in
reality no proof at all, since the facts to which it referred might
have been read from his own mind or from the records of the past by
any creature possessed of astral senses! But his ignorance of these
possibilities enabled this definite impression to be made upon him,
and the Theosophical instruction which his young friend is now nightly
giving to him will undoubtedly have a stupendous effect upon his
future, for it cannot but greatly modify not only the heaven-state
which lies immediately before him, but also his next incarnation upon
earth.
The main work, then, done for the newly dead by our helpers is that of
soothing and comforting them--of delivering them when possible from
the terrible though unreasoning fear which but too often seizes them,
and not only causes them much unnecessary suffering, but retards their
progress to higher spheres--and of enabling them as far as may be to
comprehend the future that lies before them.
Others who have been longer on the astral plane may also receive much
help, if they will but accept it, from explanations and advice as to
their course through its different stages. They may, for example, be
warned of the danger and delay caused by attempting to communicate with
the living through a medium, and sometimes (though rarely) an entity
already drawn into a spiritualistic circle may be guided into higher
and healthier life. Teaching thus given to persons on this plane is by
no means lost, for though the memory of it cannot of course be directly
carried over to the next incarnation, there always remains the real
inner knowledge, and therefore the strong predisposition to accept it
immediately when heard again in the new life.
A rather remarkable instance of service rendered to the dead was the
first achievement of a very recent recruit to the band of helpers--one
who is hardly as yet a fully-fledged member. This young aspirant
had not long before lost an aged relation, for whom he had felt an
especially warm affection; and his earliest request was to be taken by
a more experienced friend to visit her in the hope that he might be of
some service to her. This was done and the effect of the meeting of the
living and the dead was very beautiful and touching. The older person’s
astral life was already approaching its end, but a condition of apathy,
dullness and uncertainty prevented her from making any immediate
progress.
But when the boy, who had been so much to her in earth-life, stood
once more before her and dissolved by the sunlight of his love the
grey mist of depression which had gathered around her, she was aroused
from her stupor; and soon she understood that he had come in order to
explain to her her situation, and to tell her of the glories of the
higher life toward which her thoughts and aspirations ought now to be
directed. But when this was fully realized, there was such an awakening
of dormant feeling in her and such an outrush of devoted affection
towards her earnest young helper, that the last fetters which bound her
to the astral life were broken, and that one great outburst of love
and gratitude swept her forthwith into the higher consciousness of the
heaven-world. Truly there is no greater and more beneficent power in
the universe than that of pure, unselfish love.