Theosophical Society,
Death
&
How to Get Through It
Lentil burgers, a thousand
press ups before breakfast and
the
daily 25 mile run may put it off for a while but death
seems
to get most of us in the end. We are pleased to
present
for your consideration, a definitive work on the
subject
by a Student of Katherine Tingley entitled
“Man After
Death”
Katherine
Tingley
1847
– 1929
Founder
& President of the
Point
Loma Theosophical Society 1896 -1929
She
and her students produced a series of informative
Theosophical
works in the early years of the 20th century
Man After
Death
By
A Student of
Katherine Tingley
Chapter 7
The Individuality and
Its Impersonations
Theosophy
urges students to make the greatest distinction in their own minds between the
immortal individuality -- the divine Christos, called
in the East the Isvara, that dwelleth in the heart of
every creature -- and the fleeting personality. Man in his ordinary state
believes that he is nothing more than the lower mind. Even the greatest
intellectual thinkers of the age do not dare to break through this hypnotic
veil, well symbolized by the teaching of the creeds that men are miserable
sinners, a depressing nightmare; or the similarly depraving notion of the
biologists that a man is no more than 'a monkey shaved.'
Theosophy
recognizes the backward state of mankind to the full and makes no attempt to
flatter its vanity with false praise. But it gives hope, and by showing that
there is the higher ego overshadowing the personality, that it is ever trying
to call attention to those things which are pure and of good report, and that
we can enter into the mansion that is waiting for us if we will only try the
right means, it destroys the fear of death.
In gaining the
real life of the soul, of which the Devachanic interlude is a pale reflection,
we really shall not be gaining any new thing; if we go about it rightly we find
that we have but to remove the obstructions that are in the path, most of which
we have built up for ourselves.
If we give up
the lower desires and turn our energies to those in harmony with the highest
human aspirations, we at once find ourselves partaking of a larger
consciousness; we begin to hear the mysterious whisper in the heart -- the
voice of the greater humanity of which we are all a part, but of which, we are
so little aware.
Without going
more deeply into metaphysics, it suffices for practical purposes that as we
remove the obstructions, the glories of real life and the existence of the true
self break in upon us. This is the only way to triumph over death. All the
greatest teachers of the ages have brought the same message.
The
terrestrial body is not the only River of Lethe, plunged into which, as Plotinus says, the soul forgets all, but Devachan partakes
of the same nature, for in that blissful state the celestial body with which
the soul is united causes it to lose sight utterly of the painful events and
thoughts of the past life. Although the real cause of Devachan is ignorance of
the higher ego, yet in our present state of evolution it is a necessary and
desirable experience; we see how necessary by the very fact -- a profound
mystery to physiology -- that to keep going and preserve sanity the higher ego
has to abandon its communication with the body for a large part of each
twenty-four hours. The higher ego never entirely quits the spiritual realms,
and although the materials used by the imagination in Devachan with which to
build its ideal life are only derived from the most sublimated thoughts and
acts of the past incarnation, yet the totality of events of that and all the
previous lives is indelibly recorded so that when real self-knowledge arrives
the veil will fall and access be gained to the records, and the course of
evolution be plainly seen. We are taught that the soul is able to look back
with purified sight a little way into the past as it re-enters earth-life. It
then sees the causes that have led it irresistibly to the new incarnation, good
or bad, and recognizes the justice of karma; it takes up the cross again with
willingness.
H. P.
Blavatsky says: "Devachan is a spiritual gestation within an ideal matrix
state," and as we emerge from it into the light of earthly day, complete
in all our potentialities for good or evil, we again have the opportunity of
keeping the simplicity of the spiritual life. Of all the poets, Wordsworth has
given us in his Intimations of Immortality the most inspired vision of
preexistence in the Devachanic state. In the haunting sweetness of his word-picture
we catch evanescent glimpses of that which we have lost:
Our birth is
but a sleep and a forgetting;
The Soul that
rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had
elsewhere its setting
And cometh
from afar;
Not in entire
forgetfulness,
And not in
utter nakedness,
But trailing
clouds of glory do we come
From God, who
is our home:
Heaven lies
about us in our infancy!
Shades of the
prison-house begin to close . . .
And this:
Hence, in a
season of calm weather
Though inland
far we be,
Our souls have
sight of that immortal sea
Which brought
us hither;
Can in a
moment travel thither
And see the
children sport upon the shore,
And hear the
mighty waters rolling evermore.
Some have been
fortunate enough to retain the "vision splendid" longer than others; some
have revived it, after recollecting how they once lost it in early childhood.
Those who never had it, to whom everything is commonplace and drab, have been
the materialistically minded, worldly-wise folk who have not sown any seeds in
their past life for the reaping in Devachan, and have therefore passed the time
while waiting for a suitable incarnation in a semi-torpid state. They may even
have reincarnated immediately, without any Devachanic break.
On the subject
of necromancy, the attempt to raise the shades of the dead, it is merely
necessary to mention that the purified soul in Devachan does not respond to
artificial means taken to revivify the astral shell (the residue of the kama-rupa) with a factitious vitality derived chiefly from
the medium and the sitters in the seance-room.
But though the
soul in Devachan is so far removed from the physical plane, and so fully
occupied with the wondrous inner experiences for which it needs to be
temporarily sequestered, that it cannot return to earth in the true sense of
the word, it has not lost touch completely with the loved ones left behind. A
mother's love is a protecting shield for her children long after she has passed
away, though she does not have the pain of seeing them suffer the vicissitudes of
life.
And at times
of great spiritual exaltation a person on earth may sense the bliss of the one
in Devachan; but we are taught that this is of very rare occurrence, and is
poles asunder from the alleged return of the souls of the dead in the seance-room -- apparitions which, when genuine, are almost
invariably caused by the astral body of the medium or the shell of the
deceased, the kama-rupa, or something else which is
not the real man, by which we mean, of course, the higher and lower manas, united at last.
The length of
time spent in Devachan is a question of difficulty; little direct information
has been given on that point, but a general average is said to be about fifteen
hundred years. In the case of persons having led an ordinary, creditable life
and having a fairly large store of lofty experiences to be assimilated, the
time will be much longer than in the case of those who have pursued none but
ignoble aims, or materialists who utterly deny the possibility of any existence
but the physical. The latter will return to earth very soon.
A study of the
cyclic periods of history gives some light on the subject; it is seen that
there is a distinct tendency for the repetition of similar events in a period
of between twelve hundred and two thousand years; witness the Renaissance of
art in the fourteenth and later centuries, which followed about 1600 years
after the great period of art in Greece. But we have not yet sufficient
historical data to be able to follow out this line of research in detail, though
as new discoveries are constantly being made, future historians will find this
a profitable study, clearing up many otherwise inexplicable difficulties.
The question
of the existence of heaven or hell presents no great difficulties to the
Theosophical student.
Hell is mainly
here on earth, where we have made the horrible conditions of existence for
ourselves; after death there is a period of purification in which many
earth-bound souls must necessarily have suffering. Heaven is the long blissful
ecstasy of Devachan, terminating in the awakening to earth-life in a new
personality, formed by the just law of karma from the seeds of action, the skandhas, carried on as seeds by the immortal reincarnating
ego after the break-up of the kama-rupa, and in which
we have a fresh chance of undoing the mistakes of the past and gaining that
real spirituality rendering the semi-illusions of Devachan, lofty as they are,
unnecessary. The two procedures of purification on earth through lives of
effort and the trials for entrance into Devachan have close points of
resemblance, and were condensed into one in the Egyptian Book of the Dead and
Job. H. P. Blavatsky tells us:
During the
sacred Mysteries the candidates for Initiation enacted the whole drama of death
and the resurrection as a glorified spirit.
Though we may
have lost the key to the profounder teachings of the Egyptian and Greek
Mysteries, we have not lost the key to the only method of regaining our high
estate. William Q. Judge, in pointing the way to reach the higher ego, the
'Warrior,' says:
It is
selflessness, unselfishness, altruism, pure love of the light for its own sake,
not for what it will confer -- these things bring the candidate face to face
with the "Warrior."
Katherine Tingley teaches people to discover and make manifest that
"You have within you the ceaseless flow of living Fire," saying
further:
According to
my knowledge, when a soul is leaving its earthly Temple, however dark and
gruesome the circumstances may be, it knows its own path. So in moving out of
the body, long before the pulse has ceased to beat or the breath is stilled, it
finds itself born into a New Life, an unspeakable joy.
Something new
has been fashioned for that soul in that sacred moment, and then it comprehends
the enormity of its mistakes and wills itself to higher things in the next
life. There are different experiences for different souls according to their
evolution, but at last each one rests in the arms of the beneficent Law, free
from the limitations of earthly life. The ordinary mind cannot fully conceive
what has happened; the soul is judged by the Law, not by any man, and when it
is reborn it not only takes with it the experience of the past, though without
the memory of details, but it takes something else that has happened at that
wonderful time when it is born into the New Life, when it is reborn in more
ways than one.
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