To the Editors of Lucifer.
As you invite questions, I take the liberty of submitting one to your consideration.
Is it not to be expected (basing one’ reasoning on Theosophical teaching) that the meeting and intercourse in Kama-loka of persons truly attached to each other must be fraught with disappointment, nay frequently even with deep grief? Let me illustrate my meaning by an example:
A mother departs this life twenty years before her son, who, deeply attached to her, longs to meet her again, and only finds her “shell,” from which all those spiritual qualities have fled which to him were the essential part of the being he loved. Even the “shell” itself, by its resemblance to the former body, only adds to his grief by keeping early memories more vividly alive, and showing him the vast difference between the entity he knew on earth and the remnant he finds.
Or take a second case:
The son meets his mother in Kama-loka after a short separation, only to find her entity in a state of disintegration, as her pure spirit has already begun to leave her astral body and to ascend towards Devachan. He has to witness this process of gradual dissolution, and day by day he feels his mother’s spirit slip away whilst his more material nature prevents him from joining in her rapid progress.
I subjoin my name and address, though not for publication, and remain,
Very truly yours,
“F. T. S.”
Editors’ Reply [H.P.B.]
Our Correspondent seems to have been misled as to the state of consciousness which entities experience in Kama-loka. He seems to have formed his conceptions on the visions of living psychics and the revelations of living mediums. But all conclusions drawn from such data are vitiated by the fact, that a living organism intervenes between the observer and the Kama-loka state per se. There can be no conscious meeting in Kama-loka, hence no grief. There is no astral disintegration pari passu with the separation of the shell from the spirit.
According to the Eastern teaching the state of the deceased in Kama-loka is not what we, living men, would recognise as “conscious.” It is rather that of a person stunned and dazed by a violent blow, who has momentarily “lost his senses.” Hence in Kama-loka there is as a rule (apart from vicarious life and consciousness awakened through contact with mediums) no recognition of friends or relatives, and therefore such a case as stated here is impossible.
We meet those we loved only in Devachan, that subjective world of perfect bliss, the state which succeeds the Kama-loka, after the separation of the principles. In Devachan all our personal, unfulfilled spiritual desires and aspirations will be realised; for we shall not be living in the hard world of matter but in those subjective realms wherein a desire finds its instant realisation; because man himself is there a god and a creator.
In dealing with the dicta of psychics and mediums, it must always be remembered that they translate, automatically and unconsciously, their experiences on any plane of consciousness, into the language and experience of our normal physical plane. And this confusion can only be avoided by the special study-training of occultism, which teaches how to trace and guide the passage of impressions from one plane to another and fix them on the memory.
Kama-loka may be compared to the dressing-room of an actor, in which he divests himself of the costume of the last part he played before rebecoming himself properly—the immortal Ego or the Pilgrim cycling in his Round of Incarnations. The Eternal Ego being stripped in Kama-loka of its lower terrestrial principles, with their passions and desires, it enters into the state of Devachan. And therefore it is said that only the purely spiritual, the nonmaterial emotions, affections, and aspirations accompany the Ego into that state of Bliss. But the process of stripping off the lower, the fourth and part of the fifth, principles is an unconscious one in all normal human beings. It is only in very exceptional cases that there is a slight return to consciousness in Kama-loka: and this is the case of very materialistic unspiritual personalities, who, devoid of the conditions requisite, cannot enter the state of absolute Rest and Bliss.