Theosophical University Press Online Edition
The ascending Radiance of the Reimbodying Ego, as it is here called for purposes of easier comprehension, is part and portion of the life-essence of the Reincarnating or Reimbodying Ego. In this radiance inheres all the personalized essence of the egoity, of the sense of ego-ship, of the man who was. It may perhaps be asked why it is that if this radiance of the Reimbodying Ego contains the essence of the human egoity, of human ego-ship, of the man who was, it does not follow the Monadic Ray in the latter's instantaneous reunion at physical death with its source, the Monad; for, from what has just been said, one would be justified in thinking that this radiance is an actual part of that already ascended Monadic Ray. The question is a pertinent one and requires at least the outline of a sufficient answer. The answer is this: The radiance -- which it must be remembered is a life-stream, and therefore actually spiritual-intellectual substance of a type -- is, so to say, entangled or involved so greatly with what may be called the 'aroma' of the complete septenary human being who was -- in other words the radiance is so humanized -- that it needs purging or cleansing of all the lower elements of a humanized and therefore imperfectly spiritual character before it is fit or able to rise out of material realms in order to achieve reunion with its Monadic source in and through and by the Reimbodying Ego. It must be remembered that the Monad is a purely spiritual entity without any adulteration of lower merely human elements, which last, in point of fact, are reflexions in the material spheres of the Ray issuing forth from the Monad; and the Reimbodying Ego, itself a higher portion of this Monadic Ray, by the radiance issuing forth from it is the self-conscious egoic center of the man. Were the Monad able to manifest its own transcendent powers directly through man and without lower intermediaries or radiances other than its own direct and unadulterate stream, then such man would be an incarnation, so to speak, of the Monad, and would be a Man-god, or, what comes to the same thing, an Avatara or a Manushya-Buddha -- a human Buddha acting in the full plenitude of his spiritual-intellectual attributes and powers.
From the foregoing it is evident enough, therefore, that this reunion of the radiance with its source cannot at death be immediately achieved, because of its being so heavily laden and stained with material attributes by its sojourn in material bodies; for no ordinary human being as yet is so purely spiritual, so definitively his own spiritual Monad, as to render such reunion possible at the instant of death. It is just this purgation or cleansing of the radiance after death and in and through the intermediate parts of the Kama-loka in the Astral Light that brings about the various post-mortem conditions that the Theosophical philosophy teaches, an outline of which is found in all theosophical books covering this episode of the Monad's peregrinations.
For a man this radiance is the most important, because the spiritual-intellectual, element or portion of his constitution; yet it is not the most spiritual, not the most evolved part, although the essential human being. It is actually the highest portion of the personality of us, and in it, in fact, lie the seeds of the future personal man-to-be in the next earth-life. The word radiance, therefore, does not imply something superior to the Monad, but just the contrary, for the radiance is the efflux or flow of a spiritual and intellectual character, originating in the Monad, passing through and working in the Reimbodying Ego, by which it is transmitted through the lower portions of the human constitution until its last delicate fibrils of consciousness, so to speak, touch the brain and heart of the human body, by and through which organs radiances of the Radiance are diffused throughout the physical vehicle by means of the various pranas, thus insuring the diffusion throughout the body both of its organic vitality and the various forms of so-called instinct which the body evidences as a living being.
This radiance, therefore, while in its essence a spirit-thing, a spiritual-intellectual force or energy, becomes humanized because of the vast number of human experiences of myriad kinds that it has passed through in other lives on this Earth, as well as because of its experiences in other worlds and on other planes as the field of human consciousness. It is not pure spirit because it has become entangled, so to say, in the human elements of man's constitution, and so to speak has become stained by them or burdened by them. In other words, it has entered into matter and material realms lower than its own native sphere. By so doing it has of course in some degree raised these lower matters: the life-atoms of which these lower matters are composed are in consequence stimulated into higher forms of activity by this contact with the inspiriting and inspiring radiance: somewhat as a beast, a dog or a monkey or a cat for instance, brought into a human home, has its evolution hurried or accelerated by the nearness and affection and tender care of its master; although one is compelled to say in this respect, in passing, that this acceleration may not by any means be a good thing for the beast in question, paradoxical as it may sound. (370)
As this radiance, the efflux from the Reincarnating or Reimbodying Ego, ascends towards its 'Father in Heaven,' i. e., the Spiritual Monad, it passes through different planes or spheres of being of the interior and invisible worlds; and in each one of these planes or worlds or spheres, as it ascends towards the Monad, i. e., towards its junction with the Monad, it sheds the life-atoms which are appropriate or native to that world: which belong to that world, and which are of too substantial a character to be as yet gathered, as it were, into the bosom of this radiance for an ascent to still higher spheres.
The life-atoms of the three highest principles or elements of Man, i. e., of the Upper Triad, that is to say, the Divine Atmic Flame, the Buddhic Monad, and the Higher Ego or Spiritual Soul, also follow the same course of action; but in their cases only when the respective life-terms of each of these are ended. As these three life-terms are exceedingly long when measured in human years, the life-term of the lowest of these three, i. e., of the Higher Ego or Spiritual Soul, being counted in billions of human years, and the life-terms of the other two comprising even much greater periods, we may say conveniently therefore that these three highest principles of man's constitution are practically everlasting, and therefore are virtually immortal. The substantial reason for their longer life-periods is the fact that they are essentially pure spiritual Force or Forces, which is equivalent to saying almost purely homogeneous spiritual substance.
It should be remembered that in all these matters we are dealing with basic elements of man's complex and composite constitution, which elements, though they are certainly substantial, are not what we humans call actually 'material' -- emphatically spiritual as regards the highest elements of man's constitution, partially so as regards man's intermediate constitution, and not so as regards the Lower Triad of man's being. Consequently, in these recondite aspects or processes of life and death, the laws of Nature which govern their respective actions and re-actions are somewhat, and perhaps greatly, different from the natural laws operative in our lower material spheres. It is necessary to have some inkling or understanding of the real nature of essential force or energy and of essential matter and of their workings or operations on the different Planes of the Universe, for in understanding these matters lies our ability to solve the so-called riddle of death.
Thus the radiance of the Reimbodying Ego, constantly attracted upwards and slowly vanishing out of the lower realms, journeys onwards as post-mortem time passes, until all that is beneath the spiritual-intellectual essence of this radiance is left behind in the Astral Light, and then, being rejoined with the Reimbodying or Reincarnating Ego, the latter, now become a quasi-spiritual entity, is fit to rejoin its 'Father in Heaven,' which is the spiritual Monad -- man's inner god. In the 'bosom of its Father' so to say, in the enclosing spiritual atmosphere of this Monad, the Reimbodying Ego then rests in ineffable peace and bliss in the Devachan for a long term of years, depending in each individual case upon the spiritual 'aroma' or karmic consequences or fruits derivative from its last life on Earth.
As man is essentially a bundle or indeed a stream of consciousness, and therefore supposedly conscious in all his parts, why does he become unconscious when he dies? Because at the moment of death there is an instantaneous transfer of the locus of self-consciousness, which ordinarily for us living human beings is in what we call the 'brain-mind,' to the highest part of the stream or flow of consciousness which man is; and just because during his life-time man has not allied his self-cognising percipient mind with this higher part of himself, considered as a flow of consciousness, he sinks into what is then to him blank unconsciousness. Yet strictly speaking, and in very truth, it is as fully 'consciousness' as before, indeed consciousness a million times more truly conscious, because it now is the essence of consciousness -- no longer a self-cognising brain-mind consciousness. (371)
A little child can be taken as an illustration in point: Speak to it about some beautiful philosophic or religious or scientific truth, or about the delights of quiet and serene thought; or speak to it about some fascinating scientific discovery. Does it pay strict attention to what you say? No, because it does not understand. Its consciousness is not centered in the higher part of itself yet, i. e., a child is not yet self-conscious and intellectually active in this higher part of its constitution; but nevertheless the little child grows in understanding, and, as the years pass, the former unconscious child, often almost entirely un-self-conscious, begins to think and to feel and to will and to become self-conscious of what its parents had been talking to it about. This is because it has now entered into a higher, wider, and profounder portion of its self-conscious activity than it had operative in itself when a prattling infant. The seat of its self-consciousness is now transferred to these higher and profounder parts, and therefore functions in them with understanding and consequent pleasure. Just so, and on analogically parallel lines, does evolution or unfolding from within outwards bring out of men into manifestation what is already latent and often inactive in them; and thus it is that as the ages glide by, men will learn little by little to transfer the seat of self-consciousness from the mere brain-mind of the astral-vital-physical body into the higher and incomparably stronger parts of themselves, so that then, in their far higher reaches of thought and self-cognising activity, they will consciously function in almost cosmic fields.
Now this process, mutatis mutandis, is exactly what happens to man's consciousness after death. The mind of the brain in which we commonly and ordinarily live as men sinks into oblivion of itself, into unconsciousness, into perfect peace. But the highest part of this same brain-mind, which is the lower end of the Ray from the Reimbodying Ego, is, after the kama-lokic experience previously described, nevertheless intensely active in its devachanic state, therein building for itself pictures of unimaginable beauty, and understanding these pictures and spiritually joying in them with an immense self-satisfaction of a spiritual kind, just as men do on earth when under the influence of some hauntingly lovely and inspiring dream.
If even when we lay down the tired body at night and sink into what is to us wake-a-day beings a state of complete unconsciousness, which is the most reposeful sleep that is, this is only because we have not yet learned during the day-time to become self-conscious in the higher parts of us; and if even the body and its brain-mind can do this, and if we return as we do in the morning to our body and become self-conscious in it again, and take up our duties anew, then assuredly is it thus when casting off this integument of flesh, this crippling veil of imperfect matter with its feeble and delicate brain: we wing our way into the stellar spaces -- but to return.
Upnos kai thanatos adelfoi, said the Greeks: "Sleep and death are brothers." But in very truth, sleep and death are not even twain, but fundamentally one. The only difference between sleep and death is this: Sleep is an imperfect death, death is a perfect, complete sleep. (372) When a man sleeps in his bed at night he dies -- but imperfectly, so that the golden thread of life and consciousness still vibrates and quivers in even the physical brain during the sleep, producing, when this happens, the dreams that sometimes delight him, that oft, harass and perplex and disturb him. The thread of radiance is still unbroken there, so that the ego, who during sleep has left the lower mind and the body behind and is soaring out into the spaces, returns along this golden vital thread linking the Monad to the astral-vital brain of the body. On the other hand, when a man dies, it is precisely like falling into a deep sleep: utter, sweet unconsciousness; and then, instantaneously, like the sounding of a soft golden note, the soul is free.
What about dreams? Is there a parallel between the dreams of the sleeping-state and the dreams of the after-death state? There is far more than a mere parallel or analogy; there is identity both of process and of fact; the differences lie in degree only. All dreams depend upon two factors: first, the mechanism of the psychic consciousness of the individual who dreams, and secondly, two kinds of forces impinging upon this mechanism. The first kind of force is the solar, lunar, and planetary influences under which an individual is born, which of course are working upon such individual uninterruptedly from birth until death -- and to a certain extent after death. The second kind of force is the reaction of the events and experiences arising in the waking-life of the individual, which reaction affects the psychic consciousness automatically when the individual is asleep. These two kinds of forces or influences, therefore, control the direction and guide the operations of the psychic consciousness of the dreamer.
The nature of dreams that a man dreams when he sleeps is caused almost wholly by the waking life that he lives. The little child, for example, has no positive dreams of any kind. Its experiences in this incarnation are as yet too trifling. Its mind, even its brain, are not yet set or fully formed. A good man never has evil dreams, at least they are of extremest rarity -- and by a 'good' man is meant a truly holy man, a grand and thoroughly elevated human character. When he dreams at all -- if indeed he does ever dream as ordinary men dream -- they are dreams of inexpressible loveliness and peace. On the other hand, an evil man, a wicked man, a man who is so selfish, and whose imagination and feelings are so restricted and imprisoned, that there never enters into his thought or feeling a kindly impulse for his brothers, feels the unfailing reaction of these impulses and characteristics of his daily life, so that when he dreams, which is frequently, he is in an emotional and mental hell for the time being, and often he is tortured horribly by his dreams. The truth is that his own thoughts come home to his mind to plague him and thus to afflict his dreaming consciousness. Thus it is thought that makes all dreams, whether of the good or of the evil man; in the latter case, the thoughts of evil, the thoughts of selfishness, the wicked thoughts, the horribly impure thoughts, that he had when he was awake, haunt his brain like avenging ghosts, and produce the horrible nightmares to which such humans are so frequently subject. Contrariwise, the man of holy life, of lofty thinking, the man who yearns to help his fellows, who is highly intelligent, impersonal, possibly a leader in spiritual and intellectual things: if such man dreams at all, he dreams dreams that the gods might envy; and the reason why no evil dreams haunt his sleeping mind is simply that thought does not produce them there, as is obvious enough from the statements that precede.
In the case of average men and women, neither very good nor very bad, when they dream they have dreams which are neither very delightful nor very terrifying, and often mixed -- inchoate, confused, perplexed. The reason here again is obvious enough: the dreams are simply reflexions of the thought of the man's mind, and as that mind during the waking hours is sometimes bent to the things of the spirit and loves the ways of beauty and peace, these thoughts return to him in his dreams, and give him beautiful dreams; just as, in similar fashion, the average man or woman occasionally gives way to thoughts of an entirely opposite character, which likewise at night return to haunt the dreaming mind.
On precisely the same grounds of reasoning and fact are based the teachings of the Esoteric Philosophy as to what occurs to the human consciousness after death, both during the stay in the Kama-loka of the Astral Light and during the interlude of blissful dreaming experience called the Devachan.
There is a certain danger in putting too much importance upon the matter of dreams and their interpretations. It is of course true that some dreams are prophetic, as it were: in other words, that to a large extent they come true because they are the foreshadowings of the automatic working of consciousness of what that consciousness itself, because of its biases and tendencies, will bring to pass in the future. If we designate the consciousness by X and its succeeding two increments of unfolding by Y and Z, then Y and Z are inherent in X, latent in it, and will in time be unfolded from it; but the dreaming consciousness here called X may very possibly unloose from its bosom, so to speak, the increment Y, or the increment Y + Z, which will be brought forth in the future in the waking life of the man, so that such a dream as this is, becomes a prognostication of what the consciousness will unfold to be at some time in the future -- first in the measure of Y, then in the measure of X + Y + Z. Consequently dreams of this kind may be called prophetic, but they are by no means as common as one might suppose; although it could very plausibly be argued that if an observer of this hypothetical dreaming man were quasi-omniscient, he would be able to discern in all the dreams of the man what the future would produce in the man's life. But it is obvious that there are very few such perfect soothsayers, or dream-interpreters, as the kind just specified.
Most dreams of the average individual are erratic, helter-skelter in type, and therefore wholly unreliable; and one should be extremely careful not to follow his dreams unless he be perfectly sure that they are not merely the reactions of the usually erratic and confused mind. What man is able to be 'perfectly sure' except the Mahatman: and is the average man a Mahatman, or are those individuals who have fancifully high opinions of their own powers of interpretation? There have been cases where unfortunate people have gone insane from trusting too much to the supposedly prophetic character of their dreams. It is only the full Adept or Initiate who is able to understand each and every dream, and to know whether it be a true and prophetic one or merely an ordinary psychic reaction from the experiences and events of the day just past.
Turning then to the matter of death: if a man has lived during his last life -- the life that has just ended when he dies -- a good life, a creditably manly, and moral, and spiritually and intellectually interesting life, containing little that is ethically oblique or crooked, little that he really would be ashamed of, then this man when he dies enters the Devachan very quickly, for his sojourn in or passing through the Kama-loka is brief; and his devachanic condition is one of inexpressible spiritual and mental beauty and peace. Every aspiring yearning, every spiritual hope or aspiration, every desire to do good to his fellows, that he had when he was alive and could not fulfil, perhaps because his life was not long enough, or perhaps because his opportunities were limited or not favorable -- all these unfulfilled spiritual yearnings and aspirations and hopes, now after death and in the Devachan, find their opportunity for expression in the operations of his consciousness; and his after-death state is consequently filled with relatively perfect glorification of all the loftiest and best that he had hoped to do and did not or could not do. The Devachan is that condition of the consciousness in which it rests involved in most beautiful dreams, glorified a thousand times beyond and above all mere sleep-dreaming when alive on Earth, and lasting for hundreds, possibly for thousands of years, the consciousness ringing change after change and creating new changes of the theme, with all the beauteous and free play of intellectual and spiritual color, and involving all the nuances of spiritual consciousness with almost infinite variations on the fundamental themes as the creative and imagining consciousness works upon them; just as a high-minded man in deep sleep, when he dreams, has his dreaming consciousness running up and down the scale of thought in a wonderful mental fairyland of beauty and bliss. (373)
Contrariwise, the man who during his life just lived has been a man of evil character, selfish to the core, weak, self-indulging, arrogant, unkind, cruel, doing mean things, causing wretchedness to others -- in other words what is commonly called a man of 'criminal type' who does not care a snap of the fingers for the world, nor for his brother-men, nor for anything except himself -- when this man dies, then his condition is precisely like his life on Earth -- only worse because he is dreaming in the Kama-loka, and the ever-active consciousness, having thoughts only of its own kind, gives him neither rest nor surcease nor peace, and he dreams a very evil dream. This man's post-mortem consciousness rings the changes through several scores of years of evil dreams, caused by the thoughts that the man had, by the feelings he was enslaved by, the wicked imaginings he cultivated, when in earth-life. Yet even here, and in such rare and extreme cases, the evil dreaming lasts not for ever; because, as stated elsewhere, if there is enough good in the man to merit a devachanic rest, he gets in the lower devachanic conditions the precise measure of what he has in him to produce this devachanic peace, and then he returns to incarnation; but his Devachan is short; or if such a man had not even a mite of good in him sufficient to produce a devachanic interlude of even small duration, then he has no Devachan at all, but returns to speedy imbodiment in the material spheres of earth-life from which he was not able to separate himself even after death.
So that in ordinary sleep as well as after death there are dreams which we may qualify as being of the right-hand Path and dreams of the left-hand Path: on the one hand, beautiful dreams, kindly dreams, gentle dreams, holy dreams; and on the other hand, evil dreams, horrible dreams, continuous nightmares.
The fact of the matter is that anyone who studies the workings of his consciousness, without limiting his observations to any one function thereof, nor circumscribing his attention to any one plane thereof, will with practice be enabled very easily and with a clarity proportionate to his own powers of observation and deduction, to understand just in what ways and in what manners the post-mortem state of consciousness of the disimbodied entity -- the human being in this case -- differs from his ordinary or waking state of consciousness -- what is called by the old Sanskrit philosophical term Jagrat. This is because, as has hereinbefore frequently been stated, the essence of man is essentially a stream of consciousness, focused or focalized at different portions of this stream in what are commonly called in Theosophical studies in human psychology the various souls or egos or 'knots' or foci of human conscious existence. So true is this, that the rule applies likewise with thousandfold force to the nature of the consciousness of those noblest Flowers of the human race who are known by various names, such as Buddhas or Christs, or Mahatmans, or 'Saints' or 'Holy Men,' etc. There is no fundamental or radical difference between the consciousness of the ordinary man and that of the human god-man, because the consciousness, or stream or flow of consciousness, is in either case the same; the distinction lies not in essential differences, but in larger unfoldings into self-conscious perception and egoic realization of the higher and deeper and vaster ranges which the human man-god has evolved forth or unwrapped from within his own inmost seat of being -- that 'inmost seat' which is his link with the Cosmic Consciousness.
The import of the foregoing paragraphs and their real significance may perhaps be rendered easier of understanding to the average man by the following considerations: If a man can -- and will -- follow his consciousness in its procedures or workings from hour to hour and from day to day, and hence as a part of the workings of his consciousness study his dreams at night, i. e., when he has dreams: in other words, if he will study his reactions of the operations of his own consciousness throughout the hours of daily life to the many and various impacts of environment and circumstances upon his percipient mind, he will in this study find a veritable key, a master-key, to knowing what death -- and also sleep of course -- really is, including the so-called 'mystery' of how it comes upon him. Hence he will know, before the physical dissolution of his body, precisely what will happen to him as a center of consciousness after he has sloughed off or dropped the physical body at the critical point or phase of life called 'dying' or 'death.'
The first important fact to remember in this study is that there is just one thing that a being or an entity in this our Home, which we call the Universe, cannot ever at any time nor in any circumstances do; and it matters not what its grade in evolutionary status on the Ladder of Cosmic Life may be; and it likewise matters not in what Cosmic Hierarchy the being or entity may find itself. This one utterly impossible thing is that it cannot annihilate itself, nor can it ever find annihilation, precisely because it is in its essence of being a Droplet, a Spark, a Jiva or Monad, of the Cosmic Ocean of 'mind-stuff' -- as certain of our ultra-modern scientists sometimes call it -- which is the fundamental substance and veritable essence in and of the Universe itself. Were a Droplet or mathematical point of this Cosmic Essence of consciousness able to annihilate itself or to undergo annihilation, it would be equivalent to saying that the Essence of the Universe itself could be annihilated, which notion is sheerly absurd.
The second point to remember in this study is that at the moment of death no man, unless he be an Initiate or Adept, knows that he is then dying. This does not refer to the days or hours preceding death, but to the instant when 'death' actually occurs. The closer the approach of death, the more does the egoic consciousness take unto itself, or lapse into, a feeling of unutterable rest and peace, including the gradually increasing indifference to surrounding or environmental circumstances, beings, and things. Slowly the egoic self-consciousness lapses or glides into what men commonly call 'unconsciousness' (374) and this continues until the golden vital chain vanishes or rather suddenly is withdrawn into the inner parts of the constitution, and then these inner parts of the man are free. The egoic consciousness or ordinary self-consciousness is then truly and tremendously 'asleep': actually and precisely so, and not merely metaphorically or poetically so.
If one desire to know how he will feel when he dies, or what he will cognise at the moment of death, let him then when he lies down in his bed to sleep, grip his consciousness with his will and study the actual processes of his 'falling asleep' -- if he can! It is easy enough to do this once the idea is grasped and practice in the exercise has become more or less familiar. No man at the precise instant of 'falling asleep' knows that he is at that instant lapsing into sleep. He knows indeed the approach of sleep before this instant; he yearns for sleep perhaps; and he is more or less conscious while waiting for the oncoming of sleep. For a time he seems to himself to be thinking, and the more intensely he thinks the farther is sleep from him -- and then, he is off, he is free, he is asleep! Instant unconsciousness supervenes at the critical juncture, and it may or may not be succeeded by dreams, this depending upon a variety of factors.
Death is precisely and in all respects identical with this process of 'falling asleep.' There is, as has already been stated, absolutely no difference nor essential distinction whatsoever between the twain. It matters not at all how death comes: whether by age, by disease, by outside violence, or by the abominable crime of self-murder which men call suicide. Furthermore, both in ordinary sleep and when dying, the process of lapsing into unconsciousness may be almost instantaneous or it may be slow, but it is precisely the same in all cases, the only difference here being one of time -- short or longer as the case may be. All men die in this way and without exception, just as all men 'fall to sleep' in this way and without exception; the lapse into 'sleep' itself, whether at night or when dying, is as quick and as instantaneous as a snap of the fingers, and indeed quicker. Furthermore the instant of death always brings for a longer or shorter period the unutterable peace of perfect 'unconsciousness,' which is like gliding into a beginning, as it were a foretaste, of the devachanic bliss, involving a sense of ineffable rest, just precisely as the quick and careful observer will find to be his experience when he falls to sleep in his bed at night.
Whenever a man or a woman lies down at night and 'falls asleep' he or she then dies, imperfectly to be sure, but nevertheless dies. The difference between 'falling to sleep' and 'falling to death' or dying, is zero; as said above, the distinction between the twain is a matter of degree, and in some cases there is a distinction of time-length.
The Ancient Wisdom, the Esoteric Tradition, tells us that there are seven states of human consciousness, or rather, and more accurately expressed, that there are seven states in which the human consciousness can be and express its functions. These seven states may again be reduced to four basic states or conditions; and in naming the four, use is here made of famous old Sanskrit terms. The first is Jagrat, which means the waking state -- that which we are in when awake and moving around. The next and succeeding state is Swapna, the dreaming-sleeping state of consciousness, which is accompanied by very vivid, or imperfectly intense, or diffuse dreams. This state is very familiar to us all and is commonly called 'dreaming.' These two conditions are two of the commonest phases of our lives: during the day-time we are in the Jagrat-condition of the consciousness; at night-time when we dream we are in the Swapna-condition of the consciousness.
The third state is called Sushupti, a word which signifies that most wonderful, utterly blissful, and deepest sleep of common experience, in which the sleep itself is so relatively complete that there is no dreaming at all, neither good nor bad, because the human self-consciousness is temporarily plunged into profound self-oblivion. It is utter and perfect rest for the mind; for the mind in this condition is temporarily 'annihilated' -- not meaning this word in its common or absolute sense as utterly and for ever wiped out or extinguished, but in its philosophical sense of being utterly and completely unconscious of itself; and therefore because it is entirely nonfunctional, for the time being it exists not, although in essence it is. Analysed more accurately and more precisely, it is a becoming at-one of the man's ordinary or human self-consciousness with the manasic consciousness or Manasaputra-element within him, which lofty element or being has been described by certain Christian writers as a man's 'guardian angel' within and above him. (375) Because this state of consciousness is far higher than either our ordinary waking state or state of ordinary dreaming, and because we are not accustomed to it -- the more shame to us, because we can make it very familiar to us if we will so to do -- it is only rare and unusually evolved human beings who can at will enter into this state of Sushupti while alive in the physical body. Nevertheless, during sleep the consciousness not infrequently enters into the Sushupti-condition, and it is to the credit of the man when this happens.
It is this Sushupti-condition which is the 'unconsciousness' into which a man automatically as it were lapses or glides at the instant when either sleep or death -- the Greater Sleep -- comes upon him. Now were we men accustomed to enter into this Sushupti-condition, because of practice and exercise in doing it during life, we should retain our consciousness, i. e., our self-consciousness, when lapsing into sleep at night or into death when dying, and thus would retain our self-consciousness in and through both these phases. Those who can enter into this condition while alive and thus ally themselves with corresponding and high spiritual attributes and functioning states of their consciousness, are the Seers -- those who even while living see thus actual visions of Reality and Truth. Poets perhaps at times, or other men accustomed to high and abstract thinking, occasionally and as it were by flashes, may thus become ecstatic when the feeling of the 'person' is altogether forgotten; and, because their consciousness then in very truth ranges, at least to a certain extent, in the essence of the cosmic spheres, they may thus obtain intimations of a still loftier consciousness which verges upon almost omniscient consciousness -- experienced by these rare and unusual men temporarily in brief flashes or periods of realization.
The fourth state is higher still, and it is the last of the four. It is called Turiya-Samadhi, and it is a state which only the greatest and finest Flowers of the human race have ever attained; but all men some day will attain to it, although this will not be until the far distant aeons of what is now the future shall be with us. The Turiya-Samadhi is the state or condition of consciousness which the Buddhas and Christs, and occasionally other very great but less evolved men, reach in their times of spiritual ecstasy.
These then are the four basic conditions into which the human consciousness can enter and at least temporarily remain therein: Jagrat, our waking state; Swapna, our sleeping-dreaming state; Sushupti, the state of becoming at one with the essential 'Droplet' of Cosmic Mind within us; and Turiya-Samadhi, the same as the preceding state but on a still higher plane, signifying a becoming at-one, for a longer or a shorter time, with the essential being of our own Cosmic Divinity.
It is important to remember that these four basic conditions of the human consciousness, i. e., four conditions or states into which the human consciousness can enter or throw itself, and corresponding with the four bases of the structure of the Universe as well as of the constitution of the human being himself, are operative in the post-mortem conditions as well as in ordinary sleep. Now the reader should note carefully that the first three of the four states above mentioned are passed through by every man or woman who dies. The Jagrat-state is the state of our waking consciousness when imbodied in earth-life as stated. As death approaches, and the state of physical consciousness as we call it, the waking state, becomes dim and somewhat diffuse, there then slowly ensues the falling into dreaming, day-dreaming especially, and this, as a condition of the consciousness, is the state of Swapna. Men and women advancing into great age show clearly that they are already entering this condition. The word likewise applies to the dreaming experienced during sleep. The man thus approaching death is becoming more or less conscious in certain reaches or ranges of the astral realms; and, as just stated, in extremely advanced age is in a dream-state. When he rises out of this state, either by will, or when he sloughs off the lower physical attractions which still hold him to the Earth's sphere after death, and he enters the devachanic condition, then if his Devachan is in the higher ranges, he is in the pure Sushupti-state, the state of pure egoic consciousness, the manasaputric state as it may perhaps be called, which for him and just because he is an as yet relatively unevolved entity, is, strictly speaking, only quasi-manasaputric; but he is in the lower ranges of that state, nevertheless, just as we in this physical body are only half awake, truly speaking, although we are nevertheless awake. It is obvious enough that no two men are equally awake; one man will walk along a street, and see ten things which some other man will see only when they are pointed out to him. If then a man be evolved in sufficient degree to reach it, then, as just said, in the higher ranges of the Devachan he enters the pure Sushupti-condition. Now this Sushupti-condition has already been described in preceding paragraphs as being a state of 'unconsciousness,' and so it exactly is to the average or ordinary imbodied man; but it has likewise been pointed out that this Sushupti-condition or 'unconscious' state of the mind, is only so because the mind is not yet accustomed to live in it self-consciously, which produces the 'unconsciousness' spoken of. It actually is, therefore, a state of the most vivid and intense consciousness per se.
Any human being may, if he pursue the right course and live the life appropriate to it, have individual self-conscious experience of these wonders of consciousness. It is not something unnatural or weird or uncanny or immeasurably mysterious -- nay, not even 'unique' in any sense of this much misused term. Any normal human being who will take the care adequately to study himself, which means the procedures and nature of his essential consciousness: who will take the trouble carefully to examine himself, and to hold his mind at attention with his will while he thus studies himself, can experience 'death' as often as he please and come back from the experience vastly improved, and with a wealth of inner cognition that can be gained in no other manner. Yet a very earnest warning should here be uttered against foolish and unwise introspection, improperly conducted, and against any sort of tampering with the apparatus of the mind. These unguided attempts themselves will defeat the purpose and objective in view. The point is not to practice tricks with the lower mind by means of any kind of unwise attempt to follow or do 'yoga,' but to study one's essential consciousness -- to 'know oneself,' as the Greek oracle at Delphi so wisely advised.
He who will think earnestly of these four states of consciousness, into which he may at will throw himself with steady and adequate practice, will know -- if he can project himself, as he then ought to be able to do, into any one of these -- he will know, it is repeated, precisely what it is to pass beyond the gates of death and to do so consciously. Let this be understood literally.
When one stands at the bedside of a loved one who is passing on, let peace reign in the heart, banish agitation from the mind, and let there be utter quiet in the chamber of the passing. Disturb not by voice or lamentation the wonderful mystery of the entering of the consciousness of the dying one into the farther state. He is in truth and in every sense of the word, falling to sleep; and just as it would be a deliberate cruelty to a tired man to stand at his bedside and annoy him and move him in order to keep him awake just because one does not desire him to sleep: a thousand times more is it cruelty to do so in the case of death, which is the Greater Sleep, utter and perfect. Let him pass in peace, in quiet let him rest; let him go free. He is entering into unspeakable happiness, and into the intense activity of the spiritual intelligence which ordinary brain-mind percipiency can cognise, if somewhat feebly, but which it cannot properly understand nor realize because it cannot contain it.
For of Death, that blessed Angel of Mercy which it nearly always is, one should therefore have no fear whatsoever. It is Nature's most pitiful and blessed relief and rest, for it is Sleep, perfect, complete, and filled with ineffably lovely dreams. The man who has died -- the man who dies -- sleeps in peace; and his spiritual soul, the peregrinating Monad, gaudet in astris -- rejoices in the stars.
FOOTNOTES:
370. The statement in the text above may not be pleasing to a great many kindly-hearted and sympathetic people who truly love their pets, and assuredly the author has no intention nor desire of causing pain to them nor suggesting that the beings of lower Kingdoms should be either ignored or treated with neglect or cruelty. Far from this; it is one of our human duties to be as kind as it is possible to all beings of the lower Kingdoms; but this does in no wise destroy the force of the statement in the text that the keeping of pets is not good for the pets themselves.
It is precisely the proximity to the far more highly evolved and developed humans which works a dangerous, because out-of-time accelerated, evolution in these inferior creatures, and this is because the door into the Human Kingdom closed at about the middle point of the Fourth Root-Race. Consequently the stimulation of the psychical and intellectual faculties normally lying latent and unevolved in the beast, brings about in the beast an anomalous quasi-awakening of these attributes or faculties which cannot, because of the aforesaid door's being closed, hereafter find their proper field of expression in the beast's consciousness. The result is that while the domesticated beast is unquestionably stimulated, the stimulation is abnormal and out of time and frequently leads to suffering and diseases and to the awakening of abnormal perception in it which actually makes the unfortunate beast's life over-sensitive and often painful.
The only possible exception to this case of close association with human beings, would be that of the anthropoid apes, which, just because there is an element, however faint, of humanity in them, have the possibility of reaching the human stage as a group before this Earth-globe sinks into obscuration. It is highly probable, however, that no normal human being would care to have an anthropoid ape around the house as a pet: their extremely bestial and often disgusting habits, as well as incidentals of the same kind, would probably and fortunately preclude this. In Round Five the apes will appear as low humans. (return to text)
371. The wording in the text may be somewhat obscure to many people and seem unnecessarily recondite; but this is no fault of the author's. He has done his best -- however poor this best may be -- to hint at the sublime fact that pure and unrestricted consciousness is the very essence of man's own being, and that what men call self-consciousness is the activity of one or other of the 'knots' or foci of consciousness mentioned in the preceding pages. Any such whirlpool of consciousness caused by the characteristic functioning or activity of such a 'knot' of consciousness has a limiting and restricting effect.
The time will come in the far distant aeons of the future when these foci or 'knots' of consciousness, producing in the human constitution the karmic resultant of what we men call self-consciousness, however great these may seem to us at present to be, will disappear, because the stream of consciousness will become, so to speak, straightened and flow in direct and uninterrupted sequence.
It is thus a curious paradox that the self-consciousness which we humans so much value, and very rightly so because it is in this manner that the reflected or self-cognising function of consciousness is produced, is a temporary or transitory phase in the unfolding or unrolling or evolution of pure consciousness itself. When we shall have outgrown the existence within us of these various 'knots' or foci of consciousness, which make us 'men' with our limitations of consciousness, of which the circumscribing self-consciousness is one, then our essential consciousness will become cosmic in its reaches, then the individual "Dewdrop slips into the Shining Sea." We shall then be a million or a thousand million times as conscious as at present, but no longer self-conscious on these lower planes; but nevertheless we shall be self-conscious on far higher planes because we shall then be peregrinating and evolving through them producing therein the then superior 'knots' or foci of consciousness such as we now produce on these planes of matter. We shall from human have become spiritual. (return to text)
372. Even the fairly modern mystical Sufi poets sing the same old tale of Sleep and Death:
Nightly the souls of men thou lettest fly
From out the trap wherein they captive lie.
Nightly from out its cage each soul doth wing
Its upward way, no longer slave or king.
Heedless by night the captive of his fate;
Heedless by night the Sultan of his State.
Gone thought of gain or loss, gone grief and woe;
No thought of this, or that, or So-and-so.
. . . . .
E'en common men in sleep are caught away.
Into the Why-less Plains the spirit goes,
The while the body and the mind repose.
. . . . .
Yet for a while each night the Spirit's steed
Is from the harness of the body freed:
'Sleep is Death's brother': come, this riddle rede!
But lest at day-break they should lag behind,
Each soul He doth with a long tether bind,
That from those groves and plains He may revoke
Those errant spirits to their daily yoke.
-- Mathnawi, by Jalalu'd Din; trans. by E. G. Browne
373. The question might here arise: Is there progress for the ego in Devachan? The answer to this question depends upon what is here meant by progress. If progress means the assimilation and the digestion of all that the entity in his last incarnation has learned or experienced or gathered into his consciousness, then we may call it 'progress'; but if 'progress' means, on the other hand, that Devachan is a realm of originating causes, where causative thoughts are originated which impel him to evolve farther, then the answer is No. Even in Devachan we 'progress' only in the sense that we have stored up experiences which in the Devachan we are experiencing anew, digesting, assimilating, making integral parts of our character; so that when we return we ought to be a little farther advanced in unfoldment than when last we died. But in the Devachan we do not undertake new adventures in life because we evolve no new causative thoughts impelling us to do so. Does a man 'progress' in sleep-dreaming? No. (return to text)
374. It is exceedingly important to get a clear realization of the fact that 'consciousness' and 'unconsciousness' are not, really, different things, but one thing; nor is 'unconsciousness' the 'opposite pole' of consciousness. The fact is that what men call 'consciousness' or more commonly self-consciousness, is really the minor or less important aspect, or a derivative, of the former -- 'unconsciousness.' What is commonly called 'unconsciousness' is really pure, unadulterate, essential and fundamental CONSCIOUSNESS; and what is called 'consciousness,' i. e., the ordinary day-to-day faculty of perception and deduction and realization of one's existence, etc., is the functioning of one of the 'knots' or foci of consciousness previously spoken of and briefly described. This point is in no wise academic, but is of the first importance, and unless clearly understood, no man can ever hope to understand the nature of the essential consciousness in himself and its various operations and conditions or states of expression -- one of the latter of which states is self-consciousness.
Consequently the lapse into 'unconsciousness' at the moment of death, mentioned in the text above, is thus seen to be a rising into essential consciousness of the higher nature, which the imperfectly evolved 'knot' or focus producing ordinary self-consciousness cannot bring into egoic realization. The Essential Consciousness is therefore like the ocean, and self-consciousness is like a droplet thereof or a small vortex or minor whirlpool, producing by its intense localized activity the to us humans real but nevertheless essentially unreal or mayavi conception called self-consciousness.
Thus it is that a man is enabled to say of himself not only 'I am,' which is cognition, however imperfect, of the fundamental or essential Consciousness, but he does this through that 'knot' or focus of consciousness within him which recognises itself as 'I am I.'
The foregoing does not mean, however, that the higher in evolution a human being evolves, the more 'unconscious' he will become, in the ordinary and incorrect use of this adjective. The truth is the antithesis of this. The higher the man goes in evolutionary unfolding, the more does he become the self-expressing ego of ever-larger increments of the essential or general Consciousness which is the stream flowing from the monadic root of his being. Evolution thus produces not only a paradoxical enlarging of the knot or focus of egoic self-consciousness into the immense general consciousness of his being, but likewise this ego-knot so to speak transfers its seat of action to higher and greater foci in his constitution and does so in progressively larger measure and with ever-increasing perfection as the whirling Wheel of Life and Time works its magic upon us. (return to text)
375. It is probably perfectly true that many Christians throughout the Christian Era, have considered the 'guardian angel' to be an angelic entity or presence quite distinct and different from the man himself and one of the beings of the Angelic hierarchy; but it would be rather ridiculous to suppose that any Angel worked under the mandate of almighty God to 'guard' some erring and imperfect human being who had already been created by Divine Omniscience, foreseeing eternity, to take a path eventuating either in 'heaven' or 'hell.' Either 'God' knew the man he created or he didn't; ex hypothesi God knew where the man would ultimately find himself; and because God created such a being, knowing beforehand what would happen to him, all patter about man's using his free will, helped by his guardian angel, to do right and to save himself from 'hell' seems as unreasonable as it is inept, and is utterly a failure as an explanation.
The fact is, however, that the Theosophical Philosophy really
does teach that not only human beings, but every evolving entity
or being anywhere has its 'Guardian' spiritual Power, and this
'Guardian' is man's own inner Spiritual Monad, which from life
to life and throughout each life perpetually watches over and
unceasingly attempts to guide and to influence its imperfect
human child upwards and onwards -- although due to man's own wilfulness
and perverse self-consciousness, its grandly benevolent and when
listened to beneficent influence is felt far too imperfectly for
the man's own good. It is just this Spiritual Monad, the spiritual
center of the man's own stream of consciousness, which is what
the great Avatara, Jesus, called the Christ, had in mind when
he spoke of his 'Father in Heaven' -- his own inner divinity;
just as such a Spiritual Monad is the inner divinity or inner
god of every son of man throughout everlasting time. (return to text)