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Devachan
is a state ( not a place) that one attains after death and
before
the next life. The concept is often mistaken for Heaven.
But
there’s no need be disappointed, Devachan is still something
to
look forward to. Get some idea of what to expect with
The
South of Heaven
Guide
to
Theosophy & Devachan
Devachan
By
Annie Besant
An extract from
Among the various
conceptions presented by the Esoteric Philosophy, there are few, perhaps, which
the Western mind has found more difficulty in grasping than that of Devachan,
or Devasthan, the Devaland,
or land of the Gods.* [* The name Sukhavati, borrowed
from Tibetan Buddhism, is sometimes used instead of that of Devachan. Sukhavati, according to Schlagintweit,
is “the abode of the blessed, into which ascend those who have accumulated much
merit by the practice of virtues” and “involves the deliverance from metempsychosis”
(Buddhism in Tibet, p. 99). According to the Prasanga
school, the higher Path leads to Nirvana, the lower to Sukhavati.
But Eitel calls Sukhavati
the “Nirvana of the common people, where the saints revel in physical bliss for
aeons, until they reenter the circle of
transmigration” (‘Sanskrit-Chinese Dictionary’). Eitel,
however, under “Amitabha” states that the “popular
mind” regards the “paradise of the West” as “the haven of final redemption from
the eddies of transmigration”. When used by one of the Teachers of the Esoteric
Philosophy it covers the higher Devachanic states, but from all of these the
Soul comes back to earth.] And one of
the chief difficulties has arisen from the free use of the words illusion,
dream-state, and other similar terms, as denoting the devachanic
consciousness – a general sense of unreality having thus come to pervade the
whole conception of Devachan. When the Eastern thinker speaks of the present
earthly life as Maya, illusion, dream, the solid Western at once puts down the
phrases as allegorical and fanciful, for what can be less illusory, he thinks,
than this world of buying and selling, of beefsteaks and bottled stout. But
when similar terms are applied to a state beyond Death – a state which to him
is misty and unreal in his own religion, and which, as he sadly feels, is
lacking in all the substantial comforts dear to the family man – then he
accepts the words in their most literal and prosaic meaning, and speaks of
Devachan as a delusion in his own sense of the word. It may be well, therefore,
on the threshold of Devachan to put this question of “illusion” in its true
light.
In a deep
metaphysical sense all that is conditioned is illusory. All phenomena are
literally “appearances”, the outer masks in which the One Reality shows itself
forth in our changing universe. The more “material” and solid the appearance,
the further it is from Reality, and therefore the more illusory it is. What can
be a greater fraud than our body, so apparently solid, stable, visible and tangible?
It is a
constantly changing congeries of minute living particles, an attractive centre
into which stream continually myriads of tiny invisibles, that becomes visible
by their aggregation at this centre, and then stream away again, becoming invisible
by reason of their minuteness as they separate off from this aggregation. In
comparison with this ever-shifting but apparently stable body how much less
illusory is the mind, which is able to expose the pretensions of the body and
put it in its true light. The mind is constantly imposed on by the senses, and
Consciousness, the most real thing in us, is apt to regard itself as the
unreal. In truth, it is the thought-world that is the nearest to reality, and
things become more and more illusory as they take on more and more of a
phenomenal character.
Again, the
mind is permanent as compared with the transitory physical world. For the
“mind” is only a clumsy name for the living Thinker in us, the true and
conscious Entity, the inner Man, “that was, that is, and will be, for whom the
our shall never strike”. The less deeply this inner Man is plunged into matter,
the less unreal is his life; and when he has shaken off the garments he donned
at incarnation, his physical, ethereal, and passional
bodies, then he is nearer to the Soul of Things than he was before, and though
veils of illusion still dim his vision they are far thinner than those which
clouded it when round him was wrapped the garment of the flesh. His freer and
less illusory life is that which is without the body, and the disembodied is,
comparatively speaking, his normal state.
Out of this
normal state he plunges into physical life for brief periods in order that he
may gain experiences otherwise unattainable, and bring them back to enrich his
more abiding condition. As a diver may plunge into the depths of the ocean to
seek a pearl, so the Thinker plunges into the depths of the ocean of life to
seek the pearl of experience; but he does not stay there long; it is not his
own element; he rises up again into his own atmosphere and shakes off from him
the heavier element he leaves. And therefore it is truly
said of the
Soul that has escaped from earth that it has returned to its own place, for its
home is the “land of the Gods”, and here on earth it is an exile and a
prisoner. This view was very clearly put by a Master of Wisdom in a
conversation reported by H. P. Blavatsky, and printed under the title “Life and
Death”.* [* See Lucifer, Oct. 1892, vol. xi. No. 62.] The following extracts state the case:
The Vedantins, acknowledging two kinds of conscious existence,
the terrestrial and the spiritual, point only to the latter as an undoubted
actuality. As to the terrestrial life, owing to its changeability and
shortness, it is nothing but an illusion of our senses. Our life in the
spiritual spheres must be thought an actuality because it is there that lives
our endless, never-changing immortal I, the Sutratma.
Whereas in every new incarnation it clothes itself in a perfectly different
personality, a temporary and short-lived one …. The very essence of all this,
that is to say, spirit, force, and matter, has neither end nor beginning, but
the shape acquired by this triple unity during its incarnations, their
exterior, so to speak, is nothing but a mere illusion of personal conceptions.
This is why we call the posthumous life the only reality, and the terrestrial
one, including the personality itself, only imaginary.
Why in this
case should we call the reality sleep, and the phantasm waking?
This comparison
was made by me to facilitate your comprehension. From the standpoint of your
terrestrial notions it is perfectly accurate.
Note the
words: “From the standpoint of your terrestrial notions”, for they are the key
to all the phrases used about Devachan as an “illusion”. Our gross physical
matter is not there; the limitations imposed by it are not there; the mind is
in its own realm, where to will is to create, where to think is to see.
And so, when
the Master was asked: “Would it not be better to say that death is nothing but
a birth for a new life, or still better, a going back to eternity?” he
answered:
This is how
it really is, and I have nothing to say against such a way of putting it. Only
with our accepted views of material life the words “live” and “exist” are not
applicable to the purely subjective condition after death; and were they
employed in our Philosophy without a rigid definition of their meanings, the Vedantins would soon arrive at the ideas which are common
in our times among the American Spiritualists, who preach about spirits
marrying among themselves and with mortals. As amongst the true, not nominal,
Christians so amongst the Vedantins – the life on the
other side of the grave is the land where there are no tears, no sighs, where
there is neither marrying nor giving in marriage, and where the just realise their full perfection.
The dread of materialising mental and spiritual conceptions has always
been very strong among the Philosophers and oral Teachers of the far East.
Their constant effort has been to free the Thinker as far as possible from the
bonds of matter even while he is embodied, to open the cage for the Divine
Swallow, even though he must return to it for awhile, They are ever seeking “to
spiritualise the material”, while in the West the
continual tendency has been “to materialise the
spiritual”. So the Indian describes the life of the freed Soul in all the terms
that make it least material – illusion, dream, and so on – whereas the Hebrew endeavours to delineate it in terms descriptive of the
material luxury and splendour of earth – marriage
feast, streets of gold, thrones and crowns of solid metal and precious stones;
the Western has followed the materialising
conceptions of the Hebrew, and pictures a heaven which is merely a double of
earth with earth’s sorrows extracted, until we reach the grossest of all, the
modern Summerland, with its “spirit-husbands”, “spiritwives”,
and “spirit-infants” that go to school and college, and grow up
into
spirit-adults.
In “Notes on
Devachan”,* [* The Path, May 1890.] someone who evidently writes with knowledge
remarks of the Devachani:
The a priori
ideas of space and time do not control his perceptions; far he absolutely
creates and annihilates them at the same time. Physical existence has its
cumulative intensity from infancy to prime, and its diminishing energy from
dotage to death; so the dream-life of Devachan is lived correspondentially.
Nature cheats no more the Devachani than she does the
living physical man.
Nature provides
for him far more real bliss and happiness there than she does here, where all
the conditions of evil and chance are against him. To call the Devachan
existence a “dream” in any other sense than that of a conventional term, is to
renounce for ever the knowledge of the Esoteric Doctrine, the sole custodian of
truth.
“Dream” only
in the sense that it is not of this plane of gross matter, that it belongs not
to the physical world.
Let us try
and take a general view of the life of the Eternal Pilgrim, the inner Man, the
human Soul, during a cycle of incarnation. Before he commences his new
pilgrimage – for many pilgrimages lie behind him in the past, during which he
gained the powers which enable him to tread the present one – he is a spiritual
Being, but one who has already passed out of the passive condition of pure
Spirit, and who by previous experience of matter in past ages has evolved
intellect, the self-conscious mind. But this evolution by experience is far
from being complete, even so far as to make him master of matter; his ignorance
leaves him a prey to all the illusions of gross matter, so soon as he comes
into contact with it, and he is not fit to be a builder of a universe, being
subject to the deceptive visions caused by gross matter – as a child, looking
through a piece of blue glass, imagines all the outside world to be blue. The
object of a cycle of incarnation is to free him from these illusions, so that
when he is surrounded by and working in gross matter he may retain clear vision
and not be blinded by illusion.
Now the cycle
of incarnation is made up of two alternating states: a short one called life on
earth, during which the Pilgrim-God is plunged into gross matter, and a
comparatively long one, called life in Devachan, during which he is encircled
by subtle matter, illusive still, but far less illusive than that of earth. The
second state may fairly be called his normal one, as it is of enormous extent
as compared with the breaks in it that he spends upon earth; it is comparatively
normal also, as being less removed from his essential Divine life; he is less
encased in matter, less deluded by its swiftly-changing appearances. Slowly and
gradually, by reiterated experiences, gross matter loses its power over him and
becomes his servant instead of his tyrant. In the partial freedom of Devachan
he assimilates his experiences on earth, still partly dominated by them – at
first, indeed, almost completely dominated by them so that the devachanic life is merely a sublimated continuation of the
earth-life – but gradually freeing himself more and more as he recognises them as transitory and external, until he can
move through any region of our universe with unbroken self-consciousness, a
true Lord of Mind, the free and triumphant God. Such is the triumph of the
Divine Nature manifested in the flesh, the subduing of every form of matter to
be the obedient instrument of Spirit.
Thus the Master said:
The spiritual
Ego of the man moves in eternity like a pendulum between the hours of life and death,
but if these hours, the periods of life terrestrial and life posthumous, are
limited in their continuation, and even the very number of such breaks in
eternity between sleep and waking, between illusion and reality, have their
beginning as well as their end, the spiritual Pilgrim himself is eternal.
Therefore the
hours of his posthumous life, when unveiled he stands face to face with truth,
and the short-lived mirages of his terrestrial existence are far from him,
compose or make up, in our ideas, the only reality. Such breaks, in spite of
the fact that they are finite, do double service to the Sutratma,
which, perfecting itself constantly, follows without vacillation, though very
slowly the road leading to its last transformation, when, reaching its aim at
last, it becomes a Divine Being. They not only contribute to the reaching of
this goal, but without these finite breaks Sutratma-Buddhi
could never reach it. Sutratma is the actor, and its
numerous and different incarnations are the actor’s parts. I suppose you would
not apply to these parts, and so much the less to their costumes, the term of
personality. Like an actor the soul is bound to play; during the cycle of
births up to the very threshold of Parinirvana, many
such parts, which often are disagreeable to it, but like a bee, collecting its
honey from every flower, and leaving the rest to feed the worms of the earth,
our spiritual individuality, the Sutratma, collecting
only the nectar of moral qualities and consciousness from every terrestrial
personality in which it has to clothe itself, forced by Karma, unites at last
all these qualities in one, having then become a perfect being, a Dhyan Chohan.*
[* The Path,
May 1890.]
It is very
significant, in this connection, that every devachanic
stage is conditioned by the earth-stage that precedes it, and the Man can only
assimilate in Devachan the kinds of experience he has been gathering on earth.
A colourless, flavourless
personality has a colourless, feeble devachanic state.* [* “Notes on Devachan”, as cited.]
Husband,
father, student, patriot, artist, Christian, Buddhist – he must work out the
effects of his earth-life in his devachanic life; he
cannot eat and assimilate more food than he has gathered; he cannot reap more
harvest than he has sown seed. It takes but a moment to cast a seed into a
furrow; it takes many a month for that seed to grow into the ripened ear; but
according to the kind of the seed is the ear that grows from it, and according
to the nature of the brief earth-life is the grain reaped in the field of Aanroo.
There is a
change of occupation, a continual change in Devachan, just as much and far more
than there is in the life of any man or woman who happens to follow in his or
her whole life one sole occupation, whatever it may be, with this difference,
that to the Devachani this spiritual occupation is
always pleasant and fills his life with rapture. Life in Devachan is the
function of the aspirations of earth-life; not the indefinite prolongation of
that “single instance”, but its infinite developments, the various incidents
and events based upon and outflowing from that one
“single moment” or moments. The dreams of the objective become the realities of
the subjective existence . . .
The reward
provided by Nature for men who are benevolent in a large systematic way, and
who have not focussed their affections on an
individual or speciality, is that, if pure, they pass
the quicker for that through the Kama and Rupa Lokas
into the higher sphere of Tribhuvana, since it is one
where the formulation of abstract ideas and the consideration of general
principles fill the thought of its occupant.* [* “Notes on Devachan”, as
before.
There are a
variety of stages in Devachan; the Rupa Loka is an inferior stage, where the
Soul is still surrounded by forms. It has escaped from these personalities in
the Tribhuvana.]
Into Devachan
enters nothing that defileth, for gross matter has
been left behind with all its attributes on earth and in Kamaloka. But if the sower has sowed but little seed, the devachanic
harvest will be meagre, and the growth of the Soul
will be delayed by the paucity of the nutriment on which it has to feed. Hence
the enormous importance of the earth-life, the field of sowing, the place where
experience is to be gathered. It conditions, regulates, limits, the growth of
the Soul; it yields the rough ore which the Soul then takes in hand, and works
upon during the devachanic stage, smelting it,
forging it, tempering it, into the weapons it will take back with it for its
next earth-life.
The
experienced Soul in Devachan will make for itself a splendid instrument for its
next earth-life; the inexperienced one will forge a poor blade enough; but in
each case the only material available is that brought from earth. In Devachan
the Soul, as it were, sifts and sorts out its experiences; it lives a
comparatively free life, and gradually gains the power to estimate the earthly
experiences at their real value; it works out thoroughly and completely as
objective realities all the ideas of which it only conceived the germ on earth.
Thus, noble
aspiration is a germ which the Soul would work out into a splendid realisation in Devachan, and it would bring back with it to
earth for its next incarnation that mental image, to be materialised
on earth when opportunity offers and suitable environment presents itself. For
the mind sphere is the sphere of creation, and earth only the place for materialising the pre-existent thought. And the soul is as
an architect that works out his plans in silence and deep meditation, and then
brings them forth into the outer world where his edifice is to be builded; out
of the knowledge gained in his past life, the Soul draws his plans far the
next, and he returns to earth to put into objective material form the edifices
he has planned. This is the description of a Logos in creative activity:
Whilst Brahma
formerly, in the beginning of the Kalpas, was
meditating on creation, there appeared a creation beginning with ignorance and
consisting of darkness. … Brahma, beholding that it was defective, designed
another; and whilst he thus meditated, the animal creation was manifested. …
Beholding this creation also imperfect, Brahma again meditated, and a third
creation appeared, abounding with the quality of goodness.* [* Vishnu Purana, Bk. I. ch. v.]
The objective
manifestation follows the mental meditation; first idea, then form. Hence it
will be seen that the notion current among many Theosophists that Devachan is
waste time, is but one of the illusions due to the gross matter that blinds
them, and that their impatience of the idea of Devachan arises from the
delusion that fussing about in gross matter is the only real activity.
Whereas, in
truth, all effective action has its source in deep meditation, and out of the
Silence comes ever the creative Word. Action on this plane would be less feeble
and inefficient if it were the mere blossom of the profound root of meditation,
and if the Soul embodied passed oftener out of the body into Devachan during earth-life,
there would be less foolish action and consequent waste of time. For Devachan
is a state of consciousness, the consciousness of the Soul escaped for awhile
from the net of gross matter, and may be entered at any time by one who has
learned to withdraw his Soul from the senses as the tortoise withdraws itself
within its shell. And then, coming forth once more, action is prompt, direct,
purposeful, and the time “wasted” in meditation is more than saved by the
directness and strength of the mind-engendered act.Devachan
is the sphere of the mind, as said, it is the land of the Gods, or the Souls.
In the before quoted “Notes on Devachan” we read:
There are two
fields of causal manifestations: the objective and the subjective. The grosser
energies find their outcome in the new personality of each birth in the cycle
of evoluting individuality. The moral and spiritual
activities find their sphere of effects in Devachan.
As the moral
and spiritual activities are the most important, and as on the development of
these depends the growth of the true Man, and therefore the accomplishing of
“the object of creation, the liberation of Soul”, we may begin to understand
something of the vast importance of the devachanic
state.
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A B C D EFG H IJ KL M N OP QR S T UV WXYZ
Complete Theosophical Glossary
in Plain Text Format
1.22MB
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What Theosophy Is From the Absolute to Man
The Formation of a Solar System The Evolution of Life
The Constitution of Man After Death Reincarnation
The Purpose of Life The Planetary Chains
The Result of Theosophical Study
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Preface to the American Edition Introduction
Occultism and its Adepts The Theosophical Society
First Occult Experiences Teachings of Occult Philosophy
Later Occult Phenomena Appendix
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Preface Theosophy and the Masters General Principles
The Earth Chain Body and Astral Body Kama – Desire
Manas Of Reincarnation Reincarnation Continued
Karma Kama Loka
Devachan
Cycles
Arguments Supporting Reincarnation
Differentiation Of Species Missing Links
Psychic Laws, Forces, and Phenomena
Psychic Phenomena and Spiritualism
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The Seven Principles of Man Helena Petrovna Blavatsky
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Karma Fundamental Principles Laws: Natural and Man-Made The Law of Laws
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