Theos-Talk Archives (February 1999 Message tt00060)

Feb 7th 1999


Some quotes on Devachan and Accidental Death, etc.

>From Theosophical sources.


Reincarnation

"The spiritual Ego of man moves in Eternity like a pendulum
between the hours of life and death.  But if these hours marking
the periods of terrestrial and spiritual life are limited in
their duration, and if the very number of such stages in Eternity
between sleep and awakening, illusion and reality, has its
beginning and its end, on the other hand the spiritual "Pilgrim"
is eternal.

"Therefore are the hours of his post-mortem life--when,
disembodied he stands face to face with truth and not the mirages
of his transitory earthly existences during the period of that
pilgrimage which we call "the cycle of rebirths"--the only
reality in our conception..."		HPB Art. II 203


"Every Spiritual Individuality has a gigantic evolutionary
journey to perform, a tremendous gyratory progress to accomplish
...from first to last of the man-bearing planets, as on each of
them, the monad has to pass through seven successive races of
man...Each of the 7 races send 7 ramifying branchlets from the
Parent Branch:  and through each of these in turn man has to
evolute before he passes on to the next higher race;  and that
seven times...The branchlets typify varying specimens of
humanity--physically and spiritually--and no one of us can miss
one single rung of the ladder...There are other and innumerable
manvantaric chains of globes bearing intelligent beings--both in
and out of our solar system--the crowns or apexes of evolutionary
being in their respective chains, some--physically and
intellectually--lower, others immeasurably higher than the man of
our chain."  M L p. 119




Nature of Consciousness--Monad--Man's Evolutionary Rounds


"...Man (physically) is a compound of all the kingdoms, and
spiritually--his individuality is no worse for being shut up
within the casing of an ant than it is for being inside a king.
It is not the outward or physical shape that dishonors and
pollutes the five principles--but the mental perversity.  Then it
is but at his fourth round when arrived at the full possession of
his Kama-energy and is completely matured, that man becomes fully
responsible, as at the sixth he may become a  Buddha and at the
seventh before the Pralaya--a "Dhyan Chohan."...He starts
downward as a simply spiritual entity--an unconscious seventh
principle (a Parabrahm in contradistinction to
Para-parabrahm)--with the germs of the other six principles lying
latent and dormant in him...(76) [ follows a description of
stages of differentiation, round by round, a kind of 'gestation'
process ]...Volition and consciousness are at the same time
self-determining and determined by causes, and the volitions of
man, his intelligence and consciousness will awake but when his
(77) fourth principle Kama is matured and completed by its
(seriatim) contact with the Kamas or energizing forces of all the
forms man has passed through in his previous three rounds.  The
present mankind is at its fourth round (...as a genus...)...so
the individual entities in them are unconsciously to themselves
performing their local earthly sevenfold cycles--hence the vast
difference in the degrees of their intelligence, energy and so
on.  Now every individuality will be followed on its ascending
arc by the Law of retribution--Karma and death accordingly.  The
perfect man or the entity which reaches full perfection, (each of
his seven principles being matured) will not be reborn here.  His
local terrestrial cycle is completed	.(The incomplete entities
have to be reborn or reincarnated)...On their fifth round after a
partial Nirvana when the zenith of the grand cycle is reached,
they will be held responsible henceforth in their descents from
sphere to sphere, as they will have to appear on this earth as a
still more perfect and intellectual race.  This downward course
has not begun but will soon...The above is the rule.  The Buddhas
and Avatars form the exception as verily we have yet some Avatars
left to us on earth."     	M L p. 75-77



Bardo  - Inter-birth State - Rupa-Loka - Rebirth


"Bardo" is the period between death and rebirth--and may last
from a few years to a kalpa.  It is divided into three
sub-periods  (1) when the Ego delivered of its mortal coil enters
into Kama-Loka (the abode of Elementaries);  (2) when it enters
into its "gestation State" [Devachan];  (3) when it is reborn in
the Rupa-Loka of Deva-Chan.  Sub-period (1) may last from a few
minutes to a number of years...sub-period (2) is "very long;"...
yet proportionate to the Ego's spiritual stamina;  sub-period (3)
lasts in proportion to the good Karma, (106) after which the
monad is again reincarnated...an Ego is borne thither then begins
fading out and finally "dies," i.e., falls into that unconscious
condition which precedes rebirth;  and... they leave the world of
bliss to be reborn in a world of causes."		M L p. 105-6



Dispersal of Consciousness after Death --  Absorption of Lower
Principles into 		Higher Ones after Death


"The world of effects are not lokas or localities.  They are the
shadow of the world of causes their souls--worlds having like men
their seven principles which develop and grow simultaneously with
the body.  Thus the body of man is wedded to and remains for ever
within the body of his planet;  his individual jivatma life
principle that which is called in physiology (72) animal spirits
returns after death to its source--Fohat;  his linga shariram
will be drawn into Akasa;  his kamarupa will recommingle with the
Universal Sakti--the Will-Force, or universal energy;  his
'animal soul' borrowed from the breath of Universal Mind will
return to the Dhyan Chohans;  his sixth principle--whether drawn
into or ejected from the matrix of the Great Passive Principle
must remain in its own sphere--either as part of the crude
material or as an individualized entity to be reborn in a higher
world of causes.  The seventh will carry it from the Devachan and
follow the new Ego to its place of re-birth..."  		M.L. p. 71-2


"...there are great varieties in the Deva-Chan states...As many
varieties of bliss, as on earth there are shades of perception
and of capability to appreciate such reward.  It is an ideated
paradise, in each case of the Ego's own making, and by him filled
with the scenery, crowded with the incidents, and thronged with
the people he would expect to find in such a sphere of
comprehensive bliss.  And it is that variety which guides the
temporary personal Ego into the current which will lead him to be
reborn in a lower or higher condition in the next world of
causes.  Everything is so harmoniously adjusted in
nature--especially in the subjective world, that no mistake can
be ever committed by the Tathagatas--or Dhyan Chohans--who guide
the impulses."        M L p. 102



Time in Kama-Loka -- Elementaries -- Danger of Mediumship


"...The rule is, that a person who dies a natural death, will
remain from "a few hours to several short years," within the
earth's attraction, i.e., in the Kama-Loka.  But exceptions are,
in the case of suicides and those who die a violent death in
general.  Hence, one of such Egos, for instance, who was destined
to live--say 80 or 90 years, but who either killed himself or was
killed by some accident, let us suppose at the age of 20--would
have to pass in the Kama-Loka not "a few years," but in his case
60 or 70 years, as an Elementary, or rather an "earth-walker;"
since he is not, unfortunately for him, even a "shell."  Happy,
thrice happy, (113) are those disembodied entities, who sleep
their long slumber and live in dream in the bosom of Space ! And
woe to those whose Trishna [desire to live] will attract them to
mediums, and woe to the latter, who tempt them with such an easy
Upadana [vehicle]...[more details on this]...And now, you may
understand why we oppose so strongly Spiritualism and
mediumship...(114)...Could the Spiritualists be only made to
understand the difference between individuality and personality,
between individual and personal immortality and some other
truths, they would be more easily persuaded that Occultists may
be fully convinced of the monad's immortality, and yet deny that
of the soul--the vehicle of the personal Ego;  that they can
firmly believe in, and themselves practice spiritual
communications and intercourse with the disembodied Egos of the
Rupa-Loka, and yet laugh at the insane idea of "shaking hands"
with a "Spirit" !;  that finally, that as the matter stands, it
is the Occultists and the Theosophists who are the true
Spiritualists, while the modern sect of that name is composed
simply of materialistic phenomenalists."
		M L  p. 112-4


Kama-Loka Consciousness  --  Proportionate to Merit


"The good and pure sleep a quiet blissful sleep, full of happy
visions of earth-life and have no consciousness of being already
for ever beyond that life.  Those who were neither good nor bad,
will sleep a dreamless, still a quiet sleep;  while the wicked
will in proportion to their grossness suffer the pangs of a
nightmare lasting years:  their thoughts become living things,
their wicked passions--real substance, and they receive back on
their heads all the misery they have heaped upon others.  Reality
and fact  if described would yield a far more terrible Inferno
than even Dante had imagined."       M L p.123



     Adept Immortality  (Across the Arupa-Lokas)

"Suffice for you, for the present to know, that a man, an Ego
like yours or mine, may be immortal from one to the other Round.
Let us say I begin my immortality at the present fourth Round,
i.e., having become a full adept (which unhappily I am not) I
arrest the hand of Death at will, and when finally obligated to
submit to it, my knowledge of the secrets of nature puts me in a
position to retain my consciousness and distinct perception of
Self as an object of my own reflective consciousness and
cognition;  and thus avoiding all such dismemberments of
principles, that as a rule take place after the physical death of
average humanity, I remain as - - -in my Ego throughout the whole
series of births and lives across the seven worlds and
Arupa-lokas until finally I land again on this earth among the
fifth race of men of the full fifth Round beings.  I would have
been in such case--"immortal" for an inconceivable (to you) long
period, embracing many milliards of years.  And yet am "I" truly
immortal for all that ?  Unless I make the same efforts as I do
now, to secure for myself another furlough from Nature's
Law, - - - will vanish and may become a Mr. Smith or an innocent
Babu, when his leave expires.  There are men who become such
mighty beings, there are men among us who may become immortal
during the remainder of the Rounds, and then take their appointed
place among the highest Chohans, the Planetary conscious
ego-Spirits."  Of course the Monad "never perishes whatever
happens..."   M L p. 129-130



Conscious State of Victims of Accident -- Dreamless Sleep


[ Explanation of state of consciousness of violent or accidental
death victims.  See also last page of this series]

"...In cases of good and innocent Egos...the latter gravitates
irresistibly towards the 6th [buddhi] and 7th [atma ], and
thus--either slumbers surrounded by happy dreams, or, sleeps a
dreamless profound sleep until the hour strikes...The victim
whether good or bad is irresponsible for his death, even if his
death were due to some action in a previous life or an antecedent
birth;  was an act...of the Law of Retribution, still, it was not
the direct result of an act deliberately committed by the
personal ego of that life during which he happened to be killed.
Had he been allowed to live longer he may have atoned for his
antecedent sins still more effectually:  and even now, the Ego
having been made to pay off the debt of his maker (the previous
Ego) is free from the blows of retributive justice.  The Dhyan
Chohans who have no hand in the guidance of the living human Ego,
protect the helpless victim when it is violently thrust out of
its element into a new one, before it is matured and made fit and
ready for it.  We tell you what we know, for we are made to learn
it through personal experience... Yes;  the victims whether good
or bad, sleep, to awake but at the hour of the last Judgment,
which is that hour of the supreme struggle between the 6th and
the 7th, and the 5th and 4th at the threshold of the gestation
state.  And even after that, when the 6th and 7th carrying off a
portion of the 5th have gone into their Akasic Samadhi
[devachan ], even then it may happen that the spiritual spoil
from the 5th will prove too weak to be reborn (132) in Deva-Chan;
in which case it will there and then reclothe itself in a new
body, the subjective "Being" created from the Karma of the victim
(or no victim, as the case may be) and enter upon a new
earth-existence whether upon this or any other planet [read
"Globe"]."   	M L p. 131-2


"What you were taught is the Rule.  [Bear always in mind that
there are exceptions...]  Good and pure "accidents" sleep in the
Akasa, ignorant of their change;  very wicked and impure--suffer
all the tortures of a horrible nightmare.  The majority--neither
very good nor very bad, the victims of accident or violence
(including murder)--some sleep, others become Nature pisachas,
and while a small minority may fall victims to mediums and derive
a new set of skandhas from the medium who attracts them.  Small
as their number may be, their fate is to be the most deplored."	M
L  p. 132



Food for Devachanic Reflection -- Last Thoughts


"Very true that "moment" lasts from the first to the last;  but
then it lasts but as the key-note of the whole harmony, a
definite tone of appreciable pitch, around which cluster and
develop in progressive variations desires, hopes, dreams, which,
in connection with that particular "moment" had ever crossed the
dreamer's brain during his life-time, without having ever found
their realization on earth, and which he now finds fully realized
in all their vividness in devachan, without ever suspecting that
all the blissful reality is but the progeny begotten by his own
fancy, the effects of the mental causes produced by himself.

"That particular one moment which will be most intense and
uppermost in the thought of his dying brain at the time of
dissolution will of course regulate all the other "moments;"
still the latter--minor and less vivid though they be--will be
there also, having their appointed plan in the phantasmagorical
marshaling of past dreams, and must give variety to the whole.
No man on earth, but has some decided predilection if not a
domineering passion;  no person, however humble and poor--and
often because of all that--but indulges in dreams and desires
unsatisfied though these be.  Is this monotony?  Would you call
such variations ad infinitum on the one theme, and that theme
modeling itself, on, and taking color and its definite shape
from, that group of desires which was the most intense during
life "a blank destitution of all knowledge...?"  	M L 192


"...Yes, certainly there is "a change of occupation," a continual
change in Devachan, just as much--and far more--as 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 that
difference, that to the Devachanee his special occupation is
always pleasant an fills his entire life with rapture.  Change
then there must be, for that dream-life is but the fruition, the
harvest-time of those psychic seed-germs dropped from the tree of
physical existence in our moments of dreams and hopes,
fancy-glimpses of bliss and happiness stifled in an ungrateful
social soil, blooming in the rosy dawn of Devachan, and ripening
under its ever fructifying sky.  No failures there, no
disappointments!  If man had but one single moment of ideal
happiness and experience during his life--as you think--even
then, if Devachan exists,--it could not be as you erroneously
suppose, the indefinite prolongation of that "single moment," but
the infinite developments, the various incidents and events,
based upon, and outflowing from, that one "single moment" or
moments, as the case may be;  all in short that would suggest
itself to the "dreamer's" fancy.  That one note, as I said,
struck from the lyre of life, would form but the Key-note of the
being's subjective state, and work out into numberless harmonic
tones and semi-tones of psychic phantasmagoria.  There--all
unrealized hopes, aspirations, dreams, become fully realized, and
the dreams of the objective become the realities of the
subjective existence.  And there behind the curtains of Maya its
vapors and deceptive appearances are perceived by the adept, who
has learnt the great secret how to penetrate thus deeply into the
Arcana of being."	M L 197


Devachan

"...Devachan is a state where the Ego enjoys and does not suffer,
suffering being reserved for the earth life.  It is not a
question of memory strictly speaking, but is a state where the
causes generated on this earth which can exhaust in no other
state, do so exhaust themselves, leaving the causes relating to
this plane of earth life to be afterwards exhausted here, and as
it is, like this life, a state of illusion, the Ego naturally
enlarges all its conceptions of what it thought best and highest
when it was alive, for such are the causes that relate to that
state."	WQJ--Pract. Occ. p. 258-9




"As physical existence has its cumulative intensity from infancy
to prime, and its diminishing energy thenceforward to dotage and
death, so the dream-life of devachan is lived
correspondentially... As in actual earth-life, so there is for
the Ego in devachan--the first flutter of psychic life, the
attainment of prime, the gradual exhaustion of force passing into
semi-unconsciousness, gradual oblivion and lethargy, total
oblivion and--not death but birth:  birth into another
personality, and the resumption of action which daily begets new
congeries of causes, that must be worked out in another term of
Devachan, and still another physical rebirth as a new
personality..." 	M L p. 195


"...the sensations, perceptions and ideation of a devachanee in
Rupa-Loka, will of course, be of a less subjective nature than
they would be in Arupa-Loka, in both of which the devachanic
experiences will vary in their presentation to the
subject-entity, not only as regards form, color, and substance,
but also in their formative potentialities.  But not even the
most exalted experience of a monad in the highest devachanic
state in Arupa-Loka (the last of the seven states)--is comparable
to that perfectly subjective condition of pure spirituality from
which the monad emerged to "descend into matter," and to which at
the completion of the grand cycle it must return...The "reward
provided by nature for men who are benevolent in a large,
systematic way" and who have not focused their affections upon an
individual or specialty, 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 occupants."    M L p. 199-200



Kama-Loka - Suicides - Accidental Deaths


The Adept states:  "We tell you what we know, for we are made to
learn it through personal experience."		ML p. 131


1.	Suicides:--

Though not separated completely from Buddhi and Atma yet there is
a vast gulf until the day when they would have normally died.
These two: Atma-Buddhi are passive for the intervening time, (to
the hour of the last judgment--when the last and final struggle
between Atma-Buddhi on one hand and Kama-Manas on the other
occurs).
	(Theos. Articles & Notes, p.239-40)

Suicide is death brought on voluntarily and with full and
deliberate knowledge of its immediate consequences.  (240)

If, in a fit on insanity a man commits suicide, he falls asleep
like any other victim of accident.		TA&N	240


2.	Accidental Deaths:--


The victim, good or bad, is irresponsible for his death.

Even if the death by accident were due to past Karma, it is not
the direct result of a personal act of the Ego in this life.

The Dhyan-Chohans protect the hapless accident victim when it is
violently thrust out of its life before it has matured and
been made ready for the new place in a normal way.	(239)

In the case of accidental death, the 2 groups of principles
(Atma-Buddhi-Manas) and (Astral-Prana-Kama-Lower Manas) attract
each other.								(239-240)

1.	In the case of good and innocent egos the lower 4 gravitate
irresistibly  towards Atma-Buddhi, and thus sleep,

	1. a dreamless slumber, or

	2. are surrounded by happy dreams until the hour when death
would have normally taken place occurs and the separation between
the "higher" and the "lower" principles occurs just before
Devachan ("gestation state").

If at that time Atma-Buddhi carrying the essence of Higher
Manasic experience proves to have too little for the operation
of the process of "Akasic Samadhi" in Devachan the Manasic
principle will reclothe itself in a new body (the direct
result of the remaining Karma of the victim) and enter upon a
new life on earth.	[ Quick reincarnation ? ]	TA&N	(240)

3.	Seance Room "Spirits":--

The only "visitors" at seance rooms as astral forms are:
		1.	suicides, and
2. Elementaries -- Kama-lokic remains & "Black
3. Magicians"
		4.	Executed criminals.

No pure Spirits visit any seance room.		TA&N	(240-1)

4.	Victims of Vicious Indulgence:--		( life shortening )

The cause of vice receives punishment.  Motive is everything, and
man is punished in a case of direct responsibility only.

Vicious indulgence can cause an earlier death than provided
for under the personal karma of that life.		TA&N	(240)

5.	Murderers - Executed Persons:--

Under the influence of the last violent thoughts and feelings he
felt before execution, the executed person will be ever reviewing
on the Astral Plane his anger and fear, and will be receiving the
impact of the changes made in the lives of others Influenced by
his acts.	(240-1)

Those who are vicious, and not insane, are only partly killed on
execution.  From the Astral Plane they will be affecting all
those who are sensitive enough to "feel and receive" them.

Especially at spiritualistic seances.  There they project scenes
of blood and punishment into such weak persons, influencing them
to copy. [ They may also "haunt" astrally by attraction the place
of their crime or of execution.] (241)

At scenes of collective murder, where victims are overwhelmed by
a group and killed, the struggle and emotional impact may be
reenacted several times a year for many years.  [ Ex.: Marathon ]
Those sensitive to the Astral images will see this.	TA&N	(241)

6.	Insanity:--

Suicide and murder can be committed while insane.  The period
between death of the body and the real death would be passed in
sleep.		(Theos. Articles & Notes, p. 240 241)


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