After Death: You Are Yourself - Excerpted from WIND OF THE SPIRIT By G. de Purucker (theosophist) Death is a perfect sleep and sleep an imperfect death. It is literally so. When you sleep you are partly dead. When you die, you are absolutely asleep I hope that the time will come when we shall weigh more strongly than we have been doing on the teachings of what happens after death. The average man seems to be today not so much immoral as amoral, that is, seems to have largely lost the sense of moral responsibility. If men and women could realize what is going to happen to them after death, it would awaken a certain sense of needed behavior or conduct. Let us try to restore to mankind the teaching of the ancient wisdom: as you live so will you be after you die. It is a simple teaching and it is so logical, it appeals. Some may resent it at first, they may not like it; but there is a thought there which on account of its logic, its justice, will finally throw forth sprouts of thought in the mind. If you want to understand the kama-loka and the devachan, just study yourself now, and you will know what you are going to get. Just that. You are going to get a continuation of precisely what now you are. If a man indulges in vice, what is going to happen to him? He reaps the consequences of his evildoing. He learns by it the lessons that come out of the suffering. If a man fills his mind with gross thoughts and evil dreams, he learns by it in the long run through suffering, for the effects and consequences on his mind and character will ensue. He suffers, he is in torture, he pays the penalty, he has poisoned his inner system and he wont have peace until the poison has worked itself out, until he has become what is called re-formed, re-shaped. Then he will have peace again; he will be able to sleep in peace again. Study yourself in your daily consciousness; and also study what kind of dreams you have. Why are these two conjoined? Because your dreams are from your own mind, and therefore are a part of your own consciousness. A man during his waking hours has evil dreams, evil thoughts; when he sleeps he has nightmares. He learns by them when he sleeps; he certainly is not going to have a heaven of dreams because he has filled his mind with horrid, hateful, mean, degrading thoughts. He has not built the substances of heaven. There you have the answer; and the kama-loka is simply a state of consciousness which the mans consciousness enters after death because he has made himself during his lifetime to have that kind of consciousness. It works itself out, and then he rises or sinks into whatever is his destiny: a weak devachan or no devachan at all, according to the individual. In other words, if he has made for himself a character which is X, he will have that character X, whatever it is, after death. He wont have character Y, or Z, or A, or B. Contrariwise, a man who during life has kept himself in hand, has controlled himself, has lived manly, experiences the same law precisely: the after-death state will be unconscious in the kama-loka, or very nearly so, because he has no kama-loka biases in himself; and probably there will be a blissful devachan. Suppose a man has no marked character at all, is neither particularly good nor particularly bad. What kind of after-death states is he going to have? He will have a colorless kama-loka, nothing particularly bad; and he will have a colorless devachan, nothing particularly beautiful or blissful. It will all be like a sort of vague, intangible dream. It doesnt amount to much, and consequently he wont amount to much after he dies. Or take the case of a young man of evil ways who reforms, let us say, at about middle age, and spends the rest of his life in deeds of virtue, of self-improvement. What will be his fate in the worlds to come? As stated, the kama-loka and the devachan are simply a continuation of what the man is when he dies. So consequently an evil young man becoming a good old man has practically no kama-loka of an unpleasant kind at all. He will have to pay to the uttermost farthing for any evil he did as a youth — but in his future life; his evil deeds are thought-deposits there. But as he reformed at about middle age, and lived a clean decent life thereafter, his kama-loka will be very slight because it will be simply a continuation of what he was when he died, and the devachan will be in accordance likewise. One can be in the kama-loka, as well as in the devachan, before death comes; indeed, it is possible to be in the avichi-condition even while imbodied. And here is a very important deduction we should draw from this fact: if we have kama-loka while imbodied men and women, we shall have it after death; and precisely according to the same law, because we have spiritual yearnings, dreams of a spiritual type or character while imbodied, we shall have the devachan after death. To repeat, the kama-loka is a prolongation or a continuation, until it is worked out, of what you have been through in your life. If you set your thought and mind and heart on things which bring you pain, which make you suffer because you are selfish, and stiff-necked in pride and egoism, you will assuredly continue the same bending of your consciousness after death. It cannot be otherwise. It is simply you. Therefore, the devachan and the kama-loka are prolongations or continuations of the same states of consciousness respectively that you have gone through on earth, with this difference: that being out of the body, which is at once a blind and a shield of protection, you are, as it were — thought, naked thought. And if your thought has been during life on things of horror, or if you have allowed your thought to bend in those directions while imbodied, you wont be washed free of stain merely because you have cast off the body. Your thought, which is yourself, will continue and you will have to pass through kama-loka and exhaust that phase of thought. It will have to die out as a fire will burn itself out. Similarly, indeed exactly: if in life you have had beautiful thoughts, grand thoughts, sublime thoughts, you will assuredly have the same in the devachan, but a thousandfold stronger because no longer smothered by the body when you have cast it off. So if you want to know what your destiny will be after death, just study yourself now and take warning. There is a very important and pertinent lesson that we can learn from this fact, just in that. You can make your postmortem condition what you will it to be now, before it is too late. Nothing in the universe can prevent the bliss of devachan coming to you, or rather your making it for yourself. Deduction: take yourself in hand. There you have the teaching of the kama-loka. There you have the teaching of the devachan. It is very simple. All the intricate, abstract questions I think arise largely in failing to understand the elementary principles of the teachings. When you lie down you dream, or you are unconscious. When you die you dream, or you are unconscious. You have, when you lie down at night, evil dreams or good dreams, or you are unconscious. When you die you will have evil dreams or beautiful dreams or you will be unconscious — all depending upon the individual and the life he has led. So the kama-loka and the devachan, and indeed the avichi, are not things that are going suddenly to happen to you when you die; but because your consciousness has been that way while imbodied, they, one or the other, will continue after you die. You see now the importance of ethics, and why all the great sages and seers throughout time have tried to teach men to spiritualize and refine their thoughts, to live in the heart-life, to cast out the things which are wrong and evil. The devachan is not waiting for you; the kama-loka is not waiting for you — I mean as absolute conditions now separate from you. If you had them in life, you will have them after death. The man who has had no thought of hatred or horror or detestation or venom toward another, in other words whose heart and mind have never been nests of evil, will have neither an avichi in life nor after death, nor an unhappy kama-loka in life or after death. He will have an exquisite devachan, and will come back refreshed and vigorous and strong and renewed to begin a new life and with everything in his favor. After death you continue to be precisely what you are when you die. There is the whole thing. There is the secret of the kama-loka and of the devachan and of all the intermediate states of the bardo, as the Tibetans call it. All the rest is detail, and that is why I keep emphasizing in my public lectures and in my writings that death is but a sleep. Death is a perfect sleep and sleep an imperfect death. It is literally so. When you sleep you are partly dead. When you die, you are absolutely asleep. If you grasp these simple ideas you will have the whole teaching on your thumbnail, a thumbnail picture. - kamaloka can be liken to purgatory - devachan can be liken to heaven - avichi can be liken to hell (w/o fire) but the suffering is unspeakable - bardo is the realm of the afterlife
Posted on: Sat, 13 Sep 2014 08:52:57 +0000
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