LECTURE FOUR
DEVACHAN
We have seen how at his
death a man leaves behind him the corpse, first of his physical body,
then of his etheric body and finally of his lower astral body. What
is then left when he has shed these three bodies? The memory-picture
which comes before the soul at death vanishes at the moment when the
etheric body takes leave of the astral. It sinks into the unconscious,
so to speak, and ceases to have any significance for the soul as an
immediate impression. But although the picture itself vanishes, something
important, something that may be called its fruit, survives. The total
harvest of the last life remains like a concentrated essence of forces
in the higher astral body and rests there.
But a man has often gone
through all this in the past. At each death, at the end of each
incarnation, this memory-picture has appeared before his soul and left
behind what I have called a concentrated essence of forces. So with each
life a picture is added. After his first incarnation a man had his first
memory-picture when he died; then came the second, richer than the first,
and so on. The sum-total of these pictures produces a kind of new element
in man. Before his first death a man consists of four bodies, but when
he dies for the first time he takes the first memory-picture with him.
Thus on reincarnating for the first time he has not only his four bodies
but also this product of his former life. This is the “causal”
body. So now he has five bodies: physical, etheric, astral, ego and
causal. Once this causal body has made its appearance, it remains, though
it was first constituted from the products of previous lives. Now we
can understand the difference between individuals. Some of them have
lived through many lives and so have added many pages to their Book
of Life. They have developed to a high level and possess a rich causal
body. Others have been through only a few lives; hence they have gathered
fewer fruits and have a less developed causal body.
What is the purpose of
man's repeated appearance on Earth? If there were no connection between
the various incarnations, the whole process would of course be senseless,
but that is not how it goes. Think how different life was for a man who
was incarnated a few centuries after Christ, compared with the conditions
he will find when he reincarnates today. Nowadays a child's life between
the sixth and fourteenth years is taken up with acquiring knowledge:
reading, writing, and so on. Opportunities for the cultivation and
development of human personality are very different from what they were
in the past. A man's incarnations are ordered in such a way that he
returns to the Earth only when he will find quite new conditions and
possibilities of development, and after a few centuries they will always
be there. Think how quickly the Earth is developing in every respect:
only a few thousand years ago this region was covered with primeval
forests, full of wild beasts. Men lived in caves, wore animal skins
and had only the most primitive knowledge of how to light a fire or
make tools. How different it all is today! We can see how the face
of the Earth has been transformed in a relatively short time. A man
who lived in the days of the ancient Germanic people had a picture of
the world quite different from the picture which prevails today among
people who learn to read and write. As the Earth changes, man learns
quite new things and makes them his own.
What is the usual period
between two incarnations and on what does it depend? The following
considerations will give us the answer and we shall see how the changing
conditions of the Earth come into it.
In the course of time
certain Beings have enjoyed peculiar honours. For example, in Persia in
3000 B.C.
the Twins (Gemini) were specially honoured; between
3000 B.C.
and
800 B.C.
the sacred Bull Apis (Taurus) was revered in Egypt and the Mithras
Bull in Asia Minor. After
800 B.C.
another Being came
into the foreground and the Ram or Lamb (Aries) was honoured. So arose
the legend of Jason, who went to fetch the Golden Fleece from the sacred
Ram in Asia beyond the sea. The lamb was so highly revered that in due
time Christ called Himself the “Lamb of God”, and the first
Christian symbol was not the Cross with the Saviour hanging on it, but
the Cross together with the Lamb.
This means that there
were three successive periods of civilisation, each associated with
important happenings in the heavens. The Sun takes his course in the
sky along a particular path, the Ecliptic, and at the beginning of Spring
in a given epoch the Sun rises at a definite point in the Zodiac. So
in the year
3000 B.C.
the Sun rose in Spring in the constellation of
the Bull; before that in the constellation of the Twins, and about
800 B.C.
in the constellation of the Ram. This vernal point moves slowly
backwards round the Zodiac year by year, taking 2,160 years to
pass from one constellation to the next, and people chose as the symbol
of their reverence the heavenly sign in which the vernal Sun appeared.
If today we were able to understand the powerful feelings and the exalted
states of mind which the ancients experienced as the Sun passed on into
a new constellation, we should understand also the significance of the
moment when the Sun entered the sign of Pisces. But for the materialism
of our time no such understanding is possible.
What was it, then, that
people saw in this process? The ancients saw it as an embodiment of
the forces of nature. In Winter these forces were asleep, but in Spring
they were recalled to life by the Sun. Hence the constellation in which
the Sun appeared in Spring symbolised these reawakening forces; it gave
new strength to the Sun and was felt to be worthy of particular reverence.
The ancients knew that with this movement of the Sun round the Zodiac
something important was connected, for it meant that the Sun's rays
fell on the Earth under quite different conditions as time went on.
And indeed the period of 2,160 years does signify a complete change
in the conditions of life on Earth. And this is the length of time spent
in Devachan between death and a new birth. Occultism has always recognised
these 2,160 years as a period during which conditions on Earth change
sufficiently for a man to reappear there in order to gain new
experience.
We must remember, however,
that during this period a person is generally born twice, once as a
man and once as a woman, so that on average the interval between two
incarnations is in fact about 1,000 years. It is not true that there is
a change from male to female at every seventh incarnation. The experiences
of the soul are obviously very different in a male incarnation from
those it encounters in a female incarnation. Hence the general rule
is that a soul appears once as a man and once as a woman during this
period of 2,160 years. It will then have had all the experiences available
to it under the conditions of that period; and the person will have
had the possibility and opportunity to add a new page to his Book of
Life. These radical changes in the conditions on Earth provide a schooling
for the soul. That is the purpose of reincarnation.
A man takes with him into
Devachan his causal body and the purified, ennobled parts of his astral
and etheric bodies; these belong to him permanently and he never loses
them. At a particular moment, just after he has laid aside his astral
corpse, he stands face to face with himself as if he were looking at
himself from the outside. That is the moment when he enters Devachan.
Devachan has four divisions:
The continents
The rivers and oceans
The airy region; etheric space
The region of spiritual archetypes
In the first division
everything is seen as though in a photographic negative. Everything
physical that has ever existed on this Earth, whether as mineral, plant
or animal, and everything physical that still exists, appears as a
negative. And if you see yourself in this negative form, as one among
all the others, you will be in Devachan. What is the point of seeing
yourself in this way?
You do not see yourself
once only, but by degrees you come to see yourself as you were in former
lives, and this has a deep purpose. Goethe says: “The eye is formed
by the light for the light.” He means that light is the creator
of the eye, and this is perfectly true. We see how true it is if we
observe how the eye degenerates in the absence of light. For example,
in Kentucky certain creatures went to live in caves; the caves were
dark and so the creatures did not need eyes. Gradually they lost the
light of the eyes, and their eyes atrophied. The vital fluids which
had formerly nourished their eyes were diverted to another organ which
was now more useful for them. These creatures, then, lost their sight
because their whole world was without light: the absence of light destroyed
their power of sight. Thus if there were no light, there would be no
eyes. The forces which create the eye are in the light, just as the
forces which create the ear are in the world of sound. In short, all
the organs of the body are built up by the creative forces of the universe.
If you ask what has built the brain, the answer is that without thinking
there would be no brain. When a Kepler or Galileo directed his reasoning
power to the great laws of nature, it was the wisdom of nature which
had created the organ of understanding
Ordinarily a man enters the
earthly world with his organs to a certain extent perfected. During the
interval since his last incarnation, however, new conditions have arisen,
and he has to work upon them with his spirit. In all his experiences
there is a creative power. His eyes, and the understanding which he
already possesses, were formed in an earlier incarnation. When after
death he reaches Devachan, he finds, as we have seen, the picture of
his body as it was in his last life, and within him he still carries
the fruits of the memory-picture of his last life. It is now possible
for him to compare the course of his development in his various lives:
what he was like before the experiences of his last life and what he
can become when the experiences of this latest life are added to those
of the others. Accordingly he forms for himself a picture of a new body,
standing one step higher than his previous bodies.
At the first stage in
Devachan, therefore, a man corrects his previous life-picture, and out
of the fruits of his former lives he prepares the picture of his body
for his next incarnadon.
At the second stage in
Devachan, life pulsates as a reality, as though in rivers and streams.
During earthly existence a man has life within him and he cannot perceive
it; now he sees it flowing past and he uses it to animate the form he
had built up at the first stage.
At the third stage of
Devachan, a man is surrounded by all the passions and feelings of his
past life, but now they come before him as clouds, thunder and lightning.
He sees all this as it were objectively; he learns to understand it,
and to observe it as he observes physical things on Earth; and he gathers
all his experiences into the life of his soul. By dint of seeing these
pictures of the life of soul he is able to incorporate their particular
qualities, and thus he endows with soul the body he had formed at the
first stage.
That is the purpose of
Devachan. A man has to advance a stage further there, so he himself
prepares the image of his body for his next incarnation. That is one of
his tasks in Devachan; but he has many others also. He is by no means
concerned only with himself. Everything he does is done in full
consciousness. He lives consciously in Devachan, and statements to the
contrary in theosophical books are false. How is this to be understood?
When a man is asleep, his astral body leaves the physical and etheric
bodies, and consciousness leaves him also. But that is true only while
the astral body is engaged on its usual task of repairing and restoring
harmony to the weary and worked out physical body. When a man has died,
his astral body no longer has this task to perform, and in proportion as
it is released from this task, consciousness awakens. During the man's
life his consciousness was darkened and hemmed in by the physical forces
of the body and at night he had to work on this physical body. When the
forces of the astral body are released after death, its own specific
organs immediately emerge. These are the seven lotus-flowers, the
Chakrams. Clairvoyant artists have been aware of this and have used
it as a symbol in their works: Michaelangelo created his statue of Moses
with two little horns. The lotus-flowers are distributed as follows:
The 2-petalled lotus-flower at the base of the nose,
between the eyebrows;
The 16-petalled lotus-flower in the region of the larynx;
The 12-petalled lotus-flower in the neighbourhood of the heart;
The 8- or 10-petalled lotus-flower in the region of the stomach;
A 6- and a 4-petalled lotus-flower are to be found lower down.
These astral organs are
hardly observable in the ordinary man of today, but if he becomes
clairvoyant, or goes into a state of trance, they stand out in shining,
living colours, and are in motion. Directly the lotus-flowers are in
motion, a man perceives the astral world. But the difference between
physical and astral organs is that physical organs are passive and allow
everything to act on them from outside. Eye, ear and so on have to wait
until light or sound brings them a message. Spiritual organs, on the
other hand, are active; they hold objects in their grip. But this activity
can awaken only when the forces of the astral body are not otherwise
employed; then they stream into the lotus-flowers. Even in Kamaloka, as
long as the lower parts of the astral body are still united to the man,
the astral organs are dimmed. It is only when the astral corpse has been
discarded and nothing remains with the man except what he has acquired as
permanent parts of himself — i.e. at the entrance to
Devachan — that these astral sense-organs wake to full activity; and
in Devachan man lives with them in a high degree of consciousness.
It is incorrect for
theosophical books to say that man is asleep in Devachan; incorrect that
he is concerned only with himself, or that relationships begun on Earth
are not continued there. On the contrary, a friendship truly founded on
spiritual affinity continues with great intensity. The circumstances of
physical life on Earth bring about real experiences there. The inwardness
of friendship brings nourishment to the communion of spirits in Devachan
and enriches it with new patterns; it is precisely this which feeds the
soul there. Again, an elevated aesthetic enjoyment of nature is
nourishment for the life of the soul in Devachan.
All this is what human
beings live on in Devachan. Friendships are as it were the environment
with which a man surrounds himself there. Physical conditions all too
often cut across these relationships on Earth. In Devachan the way in
which two friends are together depends only on the intensity of their
friendship. To form such relationships on Earth provides experiences
for life in Devachan.
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