Death - and After? by Annie Besant (dark books to read txt) 📖

of the Gods.[27] 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 is it 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 become 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 hour 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."[28] 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", "spirit-wives", and "spirit-infants" that go to school and college, and grow up into spirit-adults.

In "Notes on Devachan",[29] someone who evidently writes with knowledge remarks of the Devachani:

_The_ a priori _ideas of space and time do not control his
perceptions; for 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