Devachanic Plane

A previous attempt was made to describe to some extent the astral plane - the lower part of the vast unseen world in the midst of which we live and move unheeding. In this little book must be undertaken the still harder task of trying to give some idea of the stage next above that - the mental plane or the heaven-world, often spoken of in our Theosophical literature as that of Devachan or Sukhavati.

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EXCERPT

Veiled though they be under the gorgeous imagery of the Orient, we may easily trace in this passage some of the leading characteristics which have appeared most prominently in the accounts of our own modern investigators.

The "seven golden mountains" can be but the seven subdivisions of the mental plane, separated from one another by barriers impalpable, yet real and effective there as "seven rows of railings, seven rows of vast curtains, seven rows of waving trees" might be here: the seven kinds of crystalline water, having each its distinctive properties and qualities, represent the different powers and conditions of mind belonging to them respectively, while the one quality which they all have in common is that of ensuring to those residing upon them the utmost intensity of bliss which they are capable of experiencing. Its flower indeed "casts a root in the shadow of every earth," for from every world man enters the corresponding heaven, and happiness such as no tongue may tell is the blossom which burgeons forth for all who so live as to fit themselves to attain it. For they have " crossed the golden bridge" over the stream which divides this realm from the world of desire; for them the struggle between the higher and the lower is over, and for them, therefore, is "no more grief or sorrow in that cycle," until once more the man puts himself forth into, incarnation, and the celestial world is again left for a time behind.

The Bliss of the Heaven-World.

This intensity of bliss is the first great idea which must form a background to all our conceptions of the heaven-life. It is not only that we are dealing with a world in which, by its very constitution, evil and sorrow are impossible; it is not only a world in which every creature is happy; the facts of the case go far beyond all that. It is a world in which every being must, from the very fact of his presence there, be enjoying the highest spiritual bliss of which he is capable - a world whose power of response to his aspirations is limited only by his capacity to aspire.

Here for the first time we begin to grasp something of the true nature of the great Source of Life; here for the first time we catch a far-away glimpse of what the Logos must be, and of what He means us to be. And when the stupendous reality of it all bursts upon our astonished vision, we cannot but feel that, with this knowledge of the truth, life can never again look to us as it did before. We cannot but marvel at the hopeless inadequacy of all the worldly man's ideas of happiness; indeed, we cannot avoid seeing that most of them are absurdly inverted and impossible of realization, and that for the most part he has actually turned his back upon the very goal which he is seeking. But here at last is truth and beauty, far transcending all that every poet dreamed; and in the light of its surpassing glory all other joy seems dim and faint, unreal and unsatisfying.

Some detail of all this we must endeavour to make clear later on; the point to be emphasized for the moment is that this radiant sense, not only of the welcome absence of all evil and discord, but of the insistent, overwhelming presence of universal joy, is the first and most striking sensation experienced by him who enters upon the heaven-world. And it never leaves him so long as he remains there; whatever work he may be doing, whatever still higher possibilities of spiritual exaltation may arise before him as he learns more of the capabilities of this new world in which he finds himself, the strange indescribable feeling of inexpressible delight in mere existence in such at realm underlies all else - this enjoyment of the abounding joy of others is ever present with him.

Nothing on earth is like it, nothing can image it; if one could suppose the bounding life of childhood carried up into our spiritual experience and then intensified many thousand-fold, perhaps some faint shadow of an idea of it might be suggested; yet even such a simile falls miserably short of that which lies beyond all words - the tremendous spiritual vitality of this celestial world.

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EXCERPT

DEVACHAN is the current of the states of feeling that sets in, when the self, freed by death from the body and from the desires that are concerned with the body, rests from pain. It is not a cessation of activity, but an enhancement of the highest activities that prevail on earth. It is not a cessation of desires, but their sublimation and realization. The current of consciousness in Devachan flows nearer to all realities than embodied consciousness; its life and thought is a higher life, a deeper thought, a more real action, than any that obtains here. Our conceptions of it rest, too, entirely on its aspect as an illusion, and consequently our teachings about it to beginners are tinctured too much with half-conscious apology, as if we felt that here was a weak point. We must renounce this flavour of apology, for, if it is necessary, then our presentation is faulty; we must stop depicting life in Devachan as a process of castle-building in the air on an immense scale. In a universe whose purpose is the evolution of mind and of wisdom in mind there can be no such elaborated arrangement for extensive waste of time.

Periodically mind descends into the life of terrestrial matter to gain experience there; periodically it ascends to the highest level now possible to it to ripen and add to that experience. Although this ripening is as involuntary as the growth of a flower or a child it is none the less real; and as it is the result of self-examination and the conscious contemplation of experience here on earth, these processes may be voluntarily and wisely pursued on a far greater scale in Devachan. If all our ways of thinking were not so materialistic at the core, we should never have conceived of Devachan as a place or state where there is no real action, but only the effortless and profitless retrospection of an advanced senility; at best "only thought", as if thought was not action, or as if there were any other action than thought.

That to which we restrict the word "life" in ordinary speech, is the current of the states of consciousness that flows for each of us on this plane of being, states the overwhelming majority of which are concerned with the data of the physical senses. Contrasted with the life of Devachan it is a slow and a muddy current.

The states are threaded upon two strands of feeling - the feeling of the impact of physical sensation, to speak loosely, and the feeling of the impact of quite higher sensation from the spiritual being of nature and our fellows. Desire alternating towards one and the other, causes action with the object of getting more of one or the other, and causes attention and thought upon either.