Death-and After? Part 3

Among the various conceptions presented by the Esoteric Philosophy, there are few, perhaps, which the Western mind has found more difficulty in grasping than that of Devachan, or Devasthan, the Devaland, or land of the G.o.ds.[27] And one of the chief difficulties has arisen from the free use of the words illusion, dream-state, and other similar terms, as denoting the devachanic consciousness--a general sense of unreality having thus come to pervade the whole conception of Devachan. When the Eastern thinker speaks of the present earthly life as Maya, illusion, dream, the solid Western at once puts down the phrases as allegorical and fanciful, for what can be less illusory, he thinks, than this world of buying and selling, of beefsteaks and bottled stout. But when similar terms are applied to a state beyond Death--a state which to him is misty and unreal in his own religion, and which, as he sadly feels, is lacking in all the substantial comforts dear to the family man--then he accepts the words in their most literal and prosaic meaning, and speaks of Devachan as a delusion in his own sense of the word. It may be well, therefore, on the threshold of Devachan to put this question of "illusion" in its true light.

In a deep metaphysical sense all that is conditioned is illusory. All phenomena are literally "appearances", the outer masks in which the One Reality shows itself forth in our changing universe. The more "material" and solid the appearance, the further is it from Reality, and therefore the more illusory it is. What can be a greater fraud than our body, so apparently solid, stable, visible and tangible? It is a constantly changing congeries of minute living particles, an attractive centre into which stream continually myriads of tiny invisibles, that become visible by their aggregation at this centre, and then stream away again, becoming invisible by reason of their minuteness as they separate off from this aggregation. In comparison with this ever-s.h.i.+fting but apparently stable body how much less illusory is the mind, which is able to expose the pretensions of the body and put it in its true light. The mind is constantly imposed on by the senses, and Consciousness, the most real thing in us, is apt to regard itself as the unreal. In truth, it is the thought-world that is the nearest to reality, and things become more and more illusory as they take on more and more of a phenomenal character.

Again, the mind is permanent as compared with the transitory physical world. For the "mind" is only a clumsy name for the living Thinker in us, the true and conscious Ent.i.ty, the inner Man, "that was, that is, and will be, for whom the hour shall never strike". The less deeply this inner Man is plunged into matter, the less unreal is his life; and when he has shaken off the garments he donned at incarnation, his physical, ethereal, and pa.s.sional bodies, then he is nearer to the Soul of Things than he was before, and though veils of illusion still dim his vision they are far thinner than those which clouded it when round him was wrapped the garment of the flesh. His freer and less illusory life is that which is without the body, and the disembodied is, comparatively speaking, his normal state. Out of this normal state he plunges into physical life for brief periods in order that he may gain experiences otherwise unattainable, and bring them back to enrich his more abiding condition. As a diver may plunge into the depths of the ocean to seek a pearl, so the Thinker plunges into the depths of the ocean of life to seek the pearl of experience; but he does not stay there long; it is not his own element; he rises up again into his own atmosphere and shakes off from him the heavier element he leaves.

And therefore it is truly said of the Soul that has escaped from earth that it has returned to its own place, for its home is the "land of the G.o.ds", and here on earth it is an exile and a prisoner. This view was very clearly put by a Master of Wisdom in a conversation reported by H.P. Blavatsky, and printed under the t.i.tle "Life and Death."[28]

The following extracts state the case:

_The Vedantins, acknowledging two kinds of conscious existence, the terrestrial and the spiritual, point only to the latter as an undoubted actuality. As to the terrestrial life, owing to its changeability and shortness, it is nothing but an illusion of our senses. Our life in the spiritual spheres must be thought an actuality because it is there that lives our endless, never-changing immortal I, the Sutratma.

Whereas in every new incarnation it clothes itself in a perfectly different personality, a temporary and short-lived one.... The very essence of all this, that is to say, spirit, force, and matter, has neither end nor beginning, but the shape acquired by this triple unity during its incarnations, their exterior, so to speak, is nothing but a mere illusion of personal conceptions. This is why we call the posthumous life the only reality, and the terrestrial one, including the personality itself, only imaginary._

Why in this case should we call the reality sleep, and the phantasm waking?

_This comparison was made by me to facilitate your comprehension. From the standpoint of your terrestrial notions it is perfectly accurate._

Note the words: "From the standpoint of your terrestrial notions," for they are the key to all the phrases used about Devachan as an "illusion." Our gross physical matter is not there; the limitations imposed by it are not there; the mind is in its own realm, where to will is to create, where to think is to see. And so, when the Master was asked: "Would it not be better to say that death is nothing but a birth for a new life, or still better, a going back to eternity?" he answered:

_This is how it really is, and I have nothing to say against such a way of putting it. Only with our accepted views of material life the words "live" and "exist" are not applicable to the purely subjective condition after death; and were they employed in our Philosophy without a rigid definition of their meanings, the Vedantins would soon arrive at the ideas which are common in our times among the American Spiritualists, who preach about spirits marrying among themselves and with mortals. As amongst the true, not nominal, Christians so amongst the Vedantins--the life on the other side of the grave is the land where there are no_ _tears, no sighs, where there is neither marrying nor giving in marriage, and where the just realise their full perfection._

The dread of materialising mental and spiritual conceptions has always been very strong among the Philosophers and oral Teachers of the far East. Their constant effort has been to free the Thinker as far as possible from the bonds of matter even while he is embodied, to open the cage for the Divine Swallow, even though he must return to it for awhile. They are ever seeking "to spiritualise the material", while in the West the continual tendency has been "to materialise the spiritual". So the Indian describes the life of the freed Soul in all the terms that make it least material--illusion, dream, and so on--whereas the Hebrew endeavours to delineate it in terms descriptive of the material luxury and splendour of earth--marriage feast, streets of gold, thrones and crowns of solid metal and precious stones; the Western has followed the materialising conceptions of the Hebrew, and pictures a heaven which is merely a double of earth with earth's sorrows extracted, until we reach the grossest of all, the modern Summerland, with its "spirit-husbands", "spirit-wives", and "spirit-infants" that go to school and college, and grow up into spirit-adults.

In "Notes on Devachan",[29] someone who evidently writes with knowledge remarks of the Devachani:

_The_ a priori _ideas of s.p.a.ce and time do not control his perceptions; for he absolutely creates and annihilates them at the same time. Physical existence has its c.u.mulative intensity from infancy to prime, and its diminis.h.i.+ng energy from dotage to death; so the dream-life of Devachan is lived correspondentially. Nature cheats no more the Devachani than she does the living physical man. Nature provides for him far more_ real _bliss and happiness_ there _than she does_ here, _where all the conditions of evil and chance are against him.

To call the Devachan existence a "dream" in any other sense than that of a conventional term, is to renounce for ever the knowledge of the Esoteric Doctrine, the sole custodian of truth._

"Dream" only in the sense that it is not of this plane of gross matter, that it belongs not to the physical world.

Let us try and take a general view of the life of the Eternal Pilgrim, the inner Man, the human Soul, during a cycle of incarnation. Before he commences his new pilgrimage--for many pilgrimages lie behind him in the past, during which he gained the powers which enable him to tread the present one--he is a spiritual Being, but one who has already pa.s.sed out of the pa.s.sive condition of pure Spirit, and who by previous experience of matter in past ages has evolved intellect, the self-conscious mind.

But this evolution by experience is far from being complete, even so far as to make him master of matter; his ignorance leaves him a prey to all the illusions of gross matter, so soon as he comes into contact with it, and he is not fit to be a builder of a universe, being subject to the deceptive visions caused by gross matter--as a child, looking through a piece of blue gla.s.s, imagines all the outside world to be blue. The object of a cycle of incarnation is to free him from these illusions, so that when he is surrounded by and working in gross matter he may retain clear vision and not be blinded by illusion. Now the cycle of incarnation is made up of two alternating states: a short one called life on earth, during which the Pilgrim-G.o.d is plunged into gross matter, and a comparatively long one, called life in Devachan, during which he is encircled by subtle matter, illusive still, but far less illusive than that of earth. The second state may fairly be called his normal one, as it is of enormous extent as compared with the breaks in it that he spends upon earth; it is comparatively normal also, as being less removed from his essential Divine life; he is less encased in matter, less deluded by its swiftly-changing appearances. Slowly and gradually, by reiterated experiences, gross matter loses its power over him and becomes his servant instead of his tyrant. In the partial freedom of Devachan he a.s.similates his experiences on earth, still partly dominated by them--at first, indeed, almost completely dominated by them so that the devachanic life is merely a sublimated continuation of the earth-life--but gradually freeing himself more and more as he recognises them as transitory and external, until he can move through any region of our universe with unbroken self-consciousness, a true Lord of Mind, the free and triumphant G.o.d. Such is the triumph of the Divine Nature manifested in the flesh, the subduing of every form of matter to be the obedient instrument of Spirit. Thus the Master said:

_The spiritual Ego of the man moves in eternity like a pendulum between the hours of life and death, but if these_ _hours, the periods of life terrestrial and life posthumous, are limited in their continuation, and even the very number of such breaks in eternity between sleep and waking, between illusion and reality, have their beginning as well as their end, the spiritual Pilgrim himself is eternal. Therefore the_ hours of his posthumous life, _when unveiled he stands face to face with truth, and the short-lived mirages of his terrestrial existence are far from him,_ compose _or make up, in our ideas,_ the only reality. _Such breaks, in spite of the fact that they are finite, do double service to the Sutratma, which, perfecting itself constantly, follows without vacillation, though very slowly, the road leading to its last transformation, when, reaching its aim at last, it becomes a Divine Being. They not only contribute to the reaching of this goal, but without these finite breaks Sutratma-Buddhi could never reach it. Sutratma is the actor, and its numerous and different incarnations are the actor's parts. I suppose you would not apply to these parts, and so much the less to their costumes, the term of personality.

Like an actor the soul is bound to play, during the cycle of births up to the very threshold of Parinirvana, many such parts, which often are disagreeable to it, but like a bee, collecting its honey from every flower, and leaving the rest to feed the worms of the earth, our spiritual individuality, the Sutratma, collecting only the nectar of moral qualities and consciousness from every terrestrial personality in which it has to clothe itself, forced by Karma, unites at last all these qualities in one, having then become a perfect being, a Dhyan Chohan._[30]

It is very significant, in this connection, that every devachanic stage is conditioned by the earth-stage that precedes it, and the Man can only a.s.similate in Devachan the kinds of experience he has been gathering on earth.

_A colourless, flavourless personality has a colourless, feeble Devachanic state._[31]

Husband, father, student, patriot, artist, Christian, Buddhist--he must work out the effects of his earth-life in his devachanic life; he cannot eat and a.s.similate more food than he has gathered; he cannot reap more harvest than he has sown seed. It takes but a moment to cast a seed into a furrow; it takes many a month for that seed to grow into the ripened ear; but according to the kind of the seed is the ear that grows from it, and according to the nature of the brief earth-life is the grain reaped in the field of Aanroo.

_There is a change of occupation, a continual change in Devachan, just as much and far more than there is in the life of any man or woman who happens to follow in his or her whole life one sole occupation, whatever it may be, with this difference, that to the Devachani this spiritual occupation is always pleasant and fills his life with rapture. Life in Devachan is the function of the aspirations of earth-life; not the indefinite prolongation of that "single instant," but its infinite developments, the various incidents and events based upon and outflowing from that one "single moment" or moments. The dreams of the objective become the realities of the subjective existence.... The reward provided by Nature for men who are benevolent in a large systematic way, and who have not focussed their affections on an individual or speciality, is that, if pure, they pa.s.s the quicker for that through the Kama and Rupa Lokas into the higher sphere of Tribhuvana, since it is one where the formulation of abstract ideas and the consideration of general principles fill the thought of its occupant._[32]

Into Devachan enters nothing that defileth, for gross matter has been left behind with all its attributes on earth and in Kamaloka. But if the sower has sowed but little seed, the devachanic harvest will be meagre, and the growth of the Soul will be delayed by the paucity of the nutriment on which it has to feed. Hence the enormous importance of the earth-life, _the field of sowing, the place where experience is to be gathered_. It conditions, regulates, limits, the growth of the Soul; it yields the rough ore which the Soul then takes in hand, and works upon during the devachanic stage, smelting it, forging it, tempering it, into the weapons it will take back with it for its next earth-life. The experienced Soul in Devachan will make for itself a splendid instrument for its next earth-life; the inexperienced one will forge a poor blade enough; but in each case the only material available is that brought from earth. In Devachan the Soul, as it were, sifts and sorts out its experiences; it lives a comparatively free life, and gradually gains the power to estimate the earthly experiences at their real value; it works out thoroughly and completely as objective realities all the ideas of which it only conceived the germ on earth. Thus, n.o.ble aspiration is a germ which the Soul would work out into a splendid realisation in Devachan, and it would bring back with it to earth for its next incarnation that mental image, to be materialised on earth when opportunity offers and suitable environment presents itself. For the mind sphere is the sphere of creation, and earth only the place for materialising the pre-existent thought. And the soul is as an architect that works out his plans in silence and deep meditation, and then brings them forth into the outer world where his edifice is to be builded; out of the knowledge gained in his past life, the Soul draws his plans for the next, and he returns to earth to put into objective material form the edifices he has planned. This is the description of a Logos in creative activity:

Whilst Brahma formerly, in the beginning of the Kalpas, was meditating on creation, there appeared a creation beginning with ignorance and consisting of darkness.... Brahma, beholding that it was defective, designed another; and whilst he thus meditated, the animal creation was manifested....

Beholding this creation also imperfect, Brahma again meditated, and a third creation appeared, abounding with the quality of goodness.[33]

The objective manifestation follows the mental meditation; first idea, then form. Hence it will be seen that the notion current among many Theosophists that Devachan is waste time, is but one of the illusions due to the gross matter that blinds them, and that their impatience of the idea of Devachan arises from the delusion that fussing about in gross matter is the only real activity. Whereas, in truth, all effective action has its source in deep meditation, and out of the Silence comes ever the creative Word. Action on this plane would be less feeble and inefficient if it were the mere blossom of the profound root of meditation, and if the Soul embodied pa.s.sed oftener out of the body into Devachan during earth-life, there would be less foolish action and consequent waste of time. For Devachan is a state of consciousness, the consciousness of the Soul escaped for awhile from the net of gross matter, and may be entered at any time by one who has learned to withdraw his Soul from the senses as the tortoise withdraws itself within its sh.e.l.l. And then, coming forth once more, action is prompt, direct, purposeful, and the time "wasted" in meditation is more than saved by the directness and strength of the mind-engendered act.

Devachan is the sphere of the mind, as said, it is the land of the G.o.ds, or the Souls. In the before quoted "Notes on Devachan" we read:

_There are two fields of causal manifestations: the objective and the subjective. The grosser energies find their outcome in the new personality of each birth in the cycle of evoluting individuality. The moral and spiritual activities find their sphere of effects in Devachan._

As the moral and spiritual activities are the most important, and as on the development of these depends the growth of the true Man, and therefore the accomplis.h.i.+ng of "the object of creation, the liberation of Soul", we may begin to understand something of the vast importance of the devachanic state.

THE DEVACHANi.

When the Triad has shaken off its last garment, it crosses the threshold of Devachan, and becomes "a Devachani". We have seen that it is in a peaceful dreamy state before this pa.s.sage out of the earth sphere, the "second death", or "pre-devachanic unconsciousness". This condition is otherwise spoken of as the "gestation" period, because it precedes the birth of the Ego into the devachanic life. Regarded from the earth-sphere the pa.s.sage is death, while regarded from that of Devachan it is birth. Thus we find in "Notes on Devachan":

_As in actual earth-life, so there is for the Ego in Devachan the first flutter of psychic life, the attainment of prime, the gradual exhaustion of force pa.s.sing into semi-consciousness and lethargy, total oblivion, and--not death but birth, birth into another personality, and the resumption of action which daily begets new congeries of causes that must be worked out in another term of Devachan, and still another physical birth as a new personality. What the lives in Devachan and upon earth shall be respectively in each instance is determined by Karma, and this weary round of birth must be ever and ever run through until the being reaches the end of the seventh Round, or attains in the interim the wisdom of an Arhat, then that of a Buddha, and thus gets relieved for a Round or two._

When the devachanic ent.i.ty is born into this new sphere it has pa.s.sed beyond recall to earth. The embodied Soul may rise to it, but it cannot be drawn back to our world. On this a Master has spoken decisively:

_From Sukhavati down to the "Territory of Doubt," there is a variety of spiritual states, but ... as soon as it has stepped outside the Kamaloka, crossed the "Golden Bridge"

leading to the "Seven Golden Mountains," the Ego can confabulate no more with easy-going mediums. No Ernest or Joey has ever returned from the Rupa Loka, let alone the Arupa Loka, to hold sweet intercourse with men._

In the "Notes on Devachan," again, we read:

_Certainly the new Ego, once that it is reborn (in Devachan), retains for a certain time--proportionate to its earth-life--a complete recollection "of his life on earth"; but it can never revisit the Earth from Devachan except in Re-incarnation._

The Devachani is generally spoken of as the Immortal Triad, Atma-Buddhi-Manas, but it is well always to bear in mind that

Atman is no individual property of any man, but is the Divine Essence which has no body, no form, which is imponderable, invisible, and indivisible, that which does not _exist_ and yet _is_, as the Buddhists say of Nirvana. It only overshadows the mortal; that which enters into him and pervades the whole body being only it's omni-present rays or light, radiated through Buddhi, its vehicle and direct emanation.[34]

Buddhi and Manas united, with this overshadowing of Atma, form the Devachani; now, as we have seen in studying the Seven Principles, Manas is dual during earth-life, and the Lower Manas is redrawn into the Higher during the kamalokic interlude. By this reuniting of the Ray and its Source, Manas re-becomes one, and carries the pure and n.o.ble experiences of the earth-life into Devachan with it, thus maintaining the past personality as the marked characteristic of the Devachani, and it is in this prolongation of the "personal Ego", so to speak, that the "illusion" of the Devachani consists. Were the manasic ent.i.ty free from all illusion, it would see all Egos as its brother-Souls, and looking back over its past would recognise all the varied relations.h.i.+ps it had borne to others in many lives, as the actor would remember the many parts he had played with other actors, and would think of each brother actor as a man, and not in the parts he had played as his father, his son, his judge, his murderer, his master, his friend. The deeper human relations.h.i.+p would prevent the brother actors from identifying each other with their parts, and so the perfected spiritual Egos, recognising their deep unity and full brotherhood, would no longer be deluded by the trappings of earthly relations.h.i.+ps. But the Devachani, at least in the lower stages, is still within the personal boundaries of his past earth-life; he is shut into the relations.h.i.+ps of the one incarnation; his paradise is peopled with those he "_loved best with an undying love, that holy feeling that alone survives_," and thus the purified personal Ego is the salient feature, as above said, in the Devachani. Again quoting from the "Notes on Devachan":

"_Who goes to Devachan?" The personal Ego, of course; but beatified, purified, holy. Every Ego--the combination of the sixth and seventh principles[35]--which after the period of unconscious gestation is reborn into the Devachan, is of necessity as innocent and pure as a new-born babe. The fact of his being reborn at all shows the preponderance of good over evil in his old personality. And while the Karma [of Evil] steps aside for the time being to follow him in his future earth re-incarnation, he brings along with him but the Karma of his good deeds, words and thoughts into this Devachan. "Bad" is a relative term for us--as you were told more than once before--and the Law of Retribution is the only law that never errs. Hence all those who have not slipped down into the mire of unredeemable sin and b.e.s.t.i.a.lity go to the Devachan. They will have to pay for their sins, voluntary and involuntary, later on. Meanwhile they are rewarded; receive the effects of the causes produced by them._

Now in some people a sense of repulsion arises at the idea that the ties they form on earth in one life are not to be permanent in eternity. But let us look at the question calmly for a moment. When a mother first clasps her baby-son in her arms, that one relations.h.i.+p seems perfect, and if the child should die, her longing would be to re-possess him as her babe; but as he lives on through youth to manhood the tie changes, and the protective love of the mother and the clinging obedience of the child merge into a different love of friends and comrades, richer than ordinary friends.h.i.+p from the old recollections; yet later, when the mother is aged and the son in the prime of middle life, their positions are reversed and the son protects while the mother depends on him for guidance. Would the relation have been more perfect had it ceased in infancy with only the one tie, or is it not the richer and the sweeter from the different strands of which the tie is woven? And so with Egos; in many lives they may hold to each other many relations.h.i.+ps, and finally, standing as Brothers of the Lodge closely knit together, may look back over past lives and see themselves in earth-life related in the many ways possible to human beings, till the cord is woven of every strand of love and duty; would not the final unity be the richer not the poorer for the many-stranded tie? "Finally", I say; but the word is only of this cycle, for what lies beyond, of wider life and less separateness, no mind of man may know. To me it seems that this very variety of experiences makes the tie stronger, not weaker, and that it is a rather thin and poor thing to know oneself and another in only one little aspect of many-sided humanity for endless ages of years; a thousand or so years of one person in one character would, to me, be ample, and I should prefer to know him or her in some new aspect of his nature. But those who object to this view need not feel distressed, for they will enjoy the presence of their beloved in the one personal aspect held by him or her in the one incarnation they are conscious of _for as long as the desire for that presence remains_.

Only let them not desire to impose their own form of bliss on everybody else, nor insist that the kind of happiness which seems to them at this stage the only one desirable and satisfying, must be stereotyped to all eternity, through all the millions of years that lie before us. Nature gives to each in Devachan the satisfaction of all pure desires, and Manas there exercises that faculty of his innate divinity, that he "never wills in vain". Will not this suffice?

But leaving aside disputes as to what may be to us "happiness" in a future separated from our present by millions of years, so that we are no more fitted now to formulate its conditions than is a child, playing with its dolls, to formulate the deeper joys and interests of its maturity, let us understand that, according to the teachings of the Esoteric Philosophy, the Devachani is surrounded by all he loved on earth, with pure affection, and the union being on the plane of the Ego, not on the physical plane, it is free from all the sufferings which would be inevitable were the Devachani present in consciousness on the physical plane with all its illusory and transitory joys and sorrows. It is surrounded by its beloved in the higher consciousness, but is not agonised by the knowledge of what they are suffering in the lower consciousness, held in the bonds of the flesh. According to the orthodox Christian view, Death is a separation, and the "spirits of the dead" wait for reunion until those they love also pa.s.s through Death's gateway, or--according to some--until after the judgment-day is over. As against this the Esoteric Philosophy teaches that Death cannot touch the higher consciousness of man, and that it can only separate those who love each other so far as their lower vehicles are concerned; the man living on earth, blinded by matter, feels separated from those who have pa.s.sed onwards, but the Devachani, says H.P.

Blavatsky, has a complete conviction "that there is no such thing as Death at all", having left behind it all those vehicles over which Death has power. Therefore, to its less blinded eyes, its beloved are still with it; for it, the veil of matter that separates has been torn away.

A mother dies, leaving behind her little helpless children, whom she adores, perhaps a beloved husband also. We say that her "Spirit" or Ego--that individuality which is now wholly impregnated, for the entire Devachanic period, with the n.o.blest feelings held by its late _personality, i.e._, love for her children, pity for those who suffer, and so on--is now entirely separated from the "vale of tears," that its future bliss consists in that blessed ignorance of all the woes it left behind ... that the _post-mortem_ spiritual consciousness of the mother will represent to her that she lives surrounded by her children and all those whom she loved; that no gap, no link will be missing to make her disembodied state the most perfect and absolute happiness.[36]

And so again:

As to the ordinary mortal his bliss in Devachan is complete.

It is an absolute oblivion of all that gave it pain or sorrow in the past incarnation, and even oblivion of the fact that such things as pain or sorrow exist at all. The Devachani lives its intermediate cycle between two incarnations surrounded by everything it had aspired to in vain, and in the companions.h.i.+p of everything it loved on earth. It has reached the fulfilment of all its soul-yearnings. And thus it lives throughout long centuries an existence of _unalloyed_ happiness, which is the reward for its sufferings in earth-life. In short, it bathes in a sea of uninterrupted felicity spanned only by events of still greater felicity in degree.[37]

When we take the wider sweep in thought demanded by the Esoteric Philosophy, a far more fascinating prospect of persistent love and union between individual Egos rolls itself out before our eyes than was offered to us by the more limited creed of exoteric Christendom.

"Mothers love their children with an immortal love," says H.P.

Blavatsky, and the reason for this immortality in love is easily grasped when we realise that it is the same Egos that play so many parts in the drama of life, that the experience of each part is recorded in the memory of the Soul, and that between the Souls there is no separation, though during incarnation they may not realise the fact in its fulness and beauty.

We are with those whom we have lost in material form, and far, far nearer to them now than when they were alive. And it is not only in the fancy of the Devachani, as some may imagine, but in reality. For pure divine love is not merely the blossom of a human heart, but has its roots in eternity.

Spiritual holy love is immortal, and Karma brings sooner or later all those who loved each other with such a spiritual affection to incarnate once more in the same family group.[38]

Love "has its roots in eternity", and those to whom on earth we are strongly drawn are the Egos we have loved in past earth-lives and dwelt with in Devachan; coming back to earth these enduring bonds of love draw us together yet again, and add to the strength and beauty of the tie, and so on and on till all illusions are lived down, and the strong and perfected Egos stand side by side, sharing the experience of their well-nigh illimitable past.