Death - and After? - Annie Besant (e book reading free .TXT) 📗

sorrow
in the past incarnation, and even oblivion of the fact that
such things as pain or sorrow exist at all. The Devachani
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 Devachani, 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.



THE RETURN TO EARTH.

At length the causes that carried the Ego into Devachan are exhausted, the experiences gathered have been wholly assimilated, and the Soul begins to feel again the thirst for sentient material life that can be gratified only on the physical plane. The greater the degree of spirituality reached, the purer and loftier the preceding earth-life, the longer the stay in Devachan, the world of spiritual, pure, and lofty effects. [I am here ignoring the special conditions surrounding one who is forcing his own evolution, and has entered on the Path that leads to Adeptship within a very limited number of lives.] The "average time [in Devachan] is from ten to fifteen centuries", H.P. Blavatsky tells us, and the fifteen centuries cycle is the one most plainly marked in history.[39] But in modern life this period has much shortened, in consequence of the greater attraction exercised by physical objects over the heart of man. Further, it must be remembered that the "average time" is not the time spent in Devachan by any person. If one person spends there 1000 years, and another fifty, the "average" is 525. The devachanic period is longer or shorter according to the type of life which preceded it; the more there was of spiritual, intellectual, and emotional activity of a lofty kind, the longer will be the gathering in of the harvest; the more there was of activity directed to selfish gain on earth, the shorter will be the devachanic period.

When the experiences are assimilated, be the time long or short, the Ego is ready to return, and he brings back with him his now increased experience, and any further gains he may have made in Devachan along the lines of abstract thought; for, while in Devachan,

In one sense we can acquire more knowledge; that is, we can
develop further any faculty which we loved and strove after
during life, provided it is concerned with abstract and ideal
things, such as music, painting, poetry, &c.[40]

But the Ego meets, as he crosses the threshold of Devachan on his way outwards--dying out of Devachan to be reborn on earth--he meets in the "atmosphere of the terrestrial plane", the seeds of evil sown in his preceding life on earth. During the devachanic rest he has been free from all pain, all sorrow, but the evil he did in his past has been in a state of suspended animation, not of death. As seeds sown in the autumn for the spring-time lie dormant beneath the surface of the soil, but touched by the soft rain and penetrating warmth of sun begin to swell and the embryo expands and grows, so do the seeds of evil we have sown lie dormant while the Soul takes its rest in Devachan, but shoot out their roots into the new personality which begins to form itself for the incarnation of the returning man. The Ego has to take up the burden of his past, and these germs or seeds, coming over as the harvest of the past life, are the Skandhas, to borrow a convenient word from our Buddhist brethren. They consist of material qualities, sensations, abstract ideas, tendencies of mind, mental powers, and while the pure aroma of these attached itself to the Ego and passed with it into Devachan, all that was gross, base and evil remained in the state of suspended animation spoken of above. These are taken up by the Ego as he passes outwards towards terrestrial life, and are built into the new "man of flesh" which the true man is to inhabit. And so the round of births and deaths goes on, the turning of the Wheel of Life; the treading of the Cycle of Necessity, until the work is done and the building of the Perfect Man is completed.



NIRVANA.

What Devachan is to each earth-life, Nirvana is to the finished cycle of Re-incarnation, but any effective discussion of that glorious state would here be out of place. It is mentioned only to round off the "After" of Death, for no word of man, strictly limited within the narrow bounds of his lower consciousness, may avail to explain what Nirvana is, can do aught save disfigure it in striving to describe. What it is not may be roughly, baldly stated--it is not "annihilation", it is not destruction of consciousness. Mr. A.P. Sinnett has put effectively and briefly the absurdity of many of the ideas current in the West about Nirvana. He has been speaking of absolute consciousness, and proceeds:

We may use such phrases as intellectual counters, but for no
ordinary mind--dominated by its physical brain and brain-born
intellect--can they have a living signification. All that
words can convey is that Nirvana is a sublime state of
conscious rest in omniscience. It would be ludicrous, after
all that has gone before, to turn to the various discussions
which have been carried on by students of exoteric Buddhism
as to whether Nirvana does or does not mean annihilation.
Worldly similes fall short of indicating the feeling with
which the graduates of Esoteric Science regard such a
question. Does the last penalty of the law mean the highest
honour of the peerage? Is a wooden spoon the emblem of the
most illustrious pre-eminence in learning? Such questions as
these but faintly symbolise the extravagance of the question
whether Nirvana is held by Buddhism to be equivalent to
annihilation.[41]

So we learn from the _Secret Doctrine_ that the Nirvani returns to cosmic activity in a new cycle of manifestation, and that

_The thread of radiance which is imperishable and dissolves
only in Nirvana, re-emerges from it in its integrity on the
day when the Great Law calls all things back into
action._[42]

COMMUNICATIONS BETWEEN THE EARTH AND OTHER SPHERES.

We are now in position to discriminate between the various kinds of communication possible between those whom we foolishly divide into "dead" and "living," as though the body were the man, or the man could die. "Communications between the embodied and the disembodied" would be a more satisfactory phrase.

First, let us put aside as unsuitable the word Spirit: Spirit does not communicate with Spirit in any way conceivable by us. That highest principle is not yet manifest in the flesh; it remains the hidden fount of all, the eternal Energy, one of the poles of Being in manifestation. The word is loosely used to denote lofty Intelligences, who live and move beyond all conditions of matter imaginable by us, but pure Spirit is at present as inconceivable by us as pure matter. And as in dealing with possible "communications" we have average human beings as recipients, we may as well exclude the word Spirit as much as possible, and so get rid of ambiguity. But in quotations the word often occurs, in deference to the habit of the day, and it then denotes the Ego.

Taking the stages through which the living man passes after "Death", or the shaking off of the body, we can readily classify the communications that may be received, or the appearances that may be seen:

I. While the Soul has shaken off only the dense body, and remains still clothed in the etheric double. This is a brief period only, but during it the disembodied Soul may show itself, clad in this ethereal garment.

For a very short period after death, while the incorporeal
principles remain within the sphere of our earth's
attraction, it is _possible_ for spirit, under _peculiar_ and
_favourable_ conditions, to appear.[43]

It makes no communications during this brief interval, nor while dwelling in this form. Such "ghosts" are silent, dreamy, like sleep-walkers, and indeed they are nothing more than astral sleep-walkers. Equally irresponsive, but capable of expressing a single thought, as of sorrow, anxiety, accident, murder, &c., are apparitions which are merely a thought of the dying, taking shape in the astral world, and carried by the dying person's will to some particular person, with whom the dying intensely longs to communicate. Such a thought, sometimes called