The South of Heaven Guide to Theosophy and Devachan

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The South of Heaven

Guide to

Theosophy & Devachan

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The Bliss of the Heaven-World

An extract from the

Devachanic Plane by C W Leadbeater

This intensity of bliss is the first great idea which must form a background to all our conceptions of the heaven-life. It is not only that we are dealing with a world in which, by its very constitution, evil and sorrow are impossible; it is not only a world in which every creature is happy; the facts of the case go far beyond all that.

It is a world in which every being must, from the very fact of his presence there, be enjoying the highest spiritual bliss of which he is capable — a world whose power of response to his aspirations is limited only by

his capacity to aspire.

Here for the first time we begin to grasp something of the true nature of the great Source of Life; here for the first time we catch a far-away glimpse of what the Logos must be, and of what He means us to be. And when the stupendous reality of it all bursts upon our astonished vision, we cannot but feel that, with this knowledge of the truth, life can neveragain look to us as it did

before.

We cannot but marvel at the hopeless inadequacy of all the worldly man's ideas of happiness; indeed, we cannot avoid seeing that most of them are absurdly inverted and impossible of realization, and that for the most part he has actually turned his back upon the very goal which he is seeking. But here at last is truth and beauty, far transcending all that every poet dreamed; and in the light of its surpassing glory all other joy seems dim and faint, unreal and

unsatisfying.

Some detail of all this we must endeavour to make clear later on; the point to be emphasized for the moment is that this radiant sense, not only of the welcome absence of all evil and discord, but of the insistent, overwhelming presence of universal joy, is the first and most striking sensation experienced by him who enters upon the heaven-world. And it never leaves him so long as he remains there; whatever work he may be doing, whatever still higher possibilities of spiritual exaltation may arise before him as he learns more of the capabilities of this new world in which he finds himself, the strange indescribable feeling of inexpressible delight in mere existence in such at realm underlies all else — this enjoyment of the abounding joy of others is ever present with him.

Nothing on earth is like it, nothing can image it; if one could suppose the bounding life of childhood carried up into our spiritual experience and then intensified many thousand-fold, perhaps some faint shadow of an idea of it might be suggested; yet even such a simile falls miserably short of that which lies beyond all words — the tremendous spiritual vitality of this celestial

world.

One way in which this intense vitality manifests itself is the extreme rapidity of vibration of all particles and atoms of this mental matter. As a theoretical proposition we are all aware that even here on the physical plane no particle of matter, though forming part of the densest of solid bodies, is ever for a moment at rest; nevertheless when by the opening of astral vision this becomes for us no longer a mere theory of the scientists, but an actual and ever-present fact, we realize the universality of life in a manner and to an extent that was quite impossible before; our mental horizon widens out, and we begin even already to have glimpses of possibilities in nature which to those who cannot yet see must appear the wildest of dreams.

If this be the effect of acquiring the mere astral vision, and applying it to dense physical matter, try to imagine the result produced on the mind of the observer when, having left this physical plane behind and thoroughly studied the far more vivid life and infinitely more rapid vibrations of the astral, he finds a new and transcendent sense opening within him, which unfolds to his enraptured gaze yet another and a higher world, whose vibrations are as much quicker than those of our physical plane as vibrations of light are than those of sound - a world where the omnipresent life which pulsates ceaselessly around and within him is of a different order altogether, is as it were raised to an enormously higher power.

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