Theos-Talk Archives (April 2005 Message tt00893)

Hi All
Here's a quote I found from HPB on after death states :

"Our correspondent seems to have been misled as to the state of 
consciousness which entities experience in Kama-loka. He seems to 
have formed his conceptions on the visions of living psychics and 
the revelations of living mediums. But all conclusions drawn from 
such data are vitiated by the fact, that a living organism 
intervenes between the observer and the Kama-loka state per se. 
There can be no conscious meeting in Kama-loka, hence no grief. 
There is no astral disintegration pari passu with the separation of 
the shell from the spirit.

According to the Eastern teaching the state of the deceased in Kama-
loka is not what we, living men, would recognize as "conscious". It 
is rather that of a person stunned and dazed by a violent blow, who 
has momentarily "lost his senses". Hence in Kama-loka there is as a 
rule (apart from vicarious life and consciousness awakened through 
contact with mediums) no recognition of friends or relatives.

We meet those we loved only in Devachan, that subjective world of 
perfect bliss, the state which succeeds the Kama-loka, after the 
separation of the principles. In Devachan all our personal, 
unfulfilled spiritual desires and aspirations will be realized; for 
we shall not be living in the hard world of matter but in those 
subjective realms wherein a desire finds its instant realization; 
because man himself is there a god and a creator.

In dealing with the dicta of psychics and mediums, it must always be 
remembered that they translate, automatically and unconsciously, 
their experiences on any plane of consciousness, into the language 
and experience of our normal physical plane. And this confusion can 
only be avoided by the special study-training of occultism, which 
teaches how to trace and guide the passage of impressions from one 
plane to another and fix them on the memory.

Kama-loka may be compared to the dressing-room of an actor, in which 
he divests himself of the costume of the last part he played before 
rebecoming himself properly - the immortal Ego of the Pilgrim 
cycling in his Round of Incarnations. The Eternal Ego being stripped 
in Kama-loka of its lower terrestrial principles, with their 
passions and desires, it enters into the state of Devachan. And 
therefore it is said that only the purely spiritual, the non-
material emotions, affections and aspirations accompany the Ego into 
that state of Bliss. But the process of stripping off the lower, the 
fourth and part of the fifth, principles is an unconscious one in 
all normal human beings. It is only in very exceptional cases that 
there is a slight return to consciousness in Kama-loka: and this is 
the case of very materialistic unspiritual personalities, who, 
devoid of the conditions requisite, cannot enter the state of 
absolute Rest and Bliss." CW IX, 163