On what happens when the human enters in
Kama-Loka, which is the intermediate zone between Heaven and Earth, and which
corresponds roughly to what Christians call "Purgatory," William
Judge explained the following:
« Let us now consider the states of man after the
death of the body and before birth, having looked over the whole field of the
evolution of things and beings in a general way. This brings up at once the
questions:
Is there any heaven or hell, and
what are they?
Are they states or places?
Is there a spot in space where they
may be found and to which we go or from where we come?
We must also go back to the subject of the fourth principle of the
constitution of man, that called Kama in Sanskrit and desire or passion
in English. Bearing in mind what was said about that principle, and also the
teaching in respect to the astral body and the Astral Light, it will be easier
to understand what is taught about the two states ante and post
mortem. In chronological order we go into kama loka — or the plane
of desire — first on the demise of the body, and then the higher principles,
the real man, fall into the state of Devachan.
After dealing with kama loka it will be more easy to study the
question of Devachan.
WHAT HAPPENS AT THE TIME
OF DEATH?
The breath leaves the body and we say the man is dead, but that is only
the beginning of death; it proceeds on other planes. When the frame is cold and
eyes closed, all the forces of the body and mind rush through the brain, and by
a series of pictures the whole life just ended is imprinted indelibly on the
inner man not only in a general outline but down to the smallest detail of even
the most minute and fleeting impression.
At this moment, though every indication leads the physician to pronounce
for death and though to all intents and purposes the person is dead to this
life, the real man is busy in the brain, and not until his work there is ended
is the person gone. When this solemn work is over the astral body detaches
itself from the physical, and, life energy having departed, the remaining five
principles are in the plane of kama loka.
The natural separation of the principles brought about by death divides the
total man into three parts:
First, the visible body with all its elements left to further disintegration
on the earth plane, where all that it is composed of is in time resolved into
the different physical departments of nature.
Second, the kama rupa made up of the astral body and the passions and
desires, which also begins at once to go to pieces on the astral plane.
Third, the real man, the upper triad of Atma-Buddhi-Manas, deathless
but now out of earth conditions, devoid of body, begins in devachan to
function solely as mind clothed in a very ethereal vesture which it will shake
off when the time comes for it to return to earth.
WHAT IS KAMA-LOKA?
Kama loka — or the place of desire — is the astral region penetrating and
surrounding the earth. As a place it is on and in and about the earth. Its
extent is to a measurable distance from the earth, but the ordinary laws
obtaining here do not obtain there, and entities therein are not under the same
conditions as to space and time as we are.
As a state it is metaphysical, though that metaphysic relates to the
astral plane. It is called the plane of desire because it relates to the fourth
principle, and in it the ruling force is desire devoid of and divorced from
intelligence. It is an astral sphere intermediate between earthly and heavenly
life.
Beyond any doubt it is the origin of the Christian theory of purgatory,
where the soul undergoes penance for evil done and from which it can be
released by prayer and other ceremonies or offerings.
The fact underlying this superstition is that the soul may be detained
in kama loka by the enormous force of some unsatisfied desire,
and cannot get rid of the astral and kamic clothing until that desire is
satisfied by some one on earth or by the soul itself.
But if the person was pure minded and of high aspirations, the
separation of the principles on that plane is soon completed, permitting the
higher triad to go into Devachan. Being the purely astral sphere, it
partakes of the nature of the astral matter which is essentially earthly and
devilish, and in it all the forces work undirected by soul or conscience.
It is the slag-pit, as it were, of the great furnace of life, where
nature provides for the sloughing off of elements which have no place in Devachan,
and for that reason it must have many degrees, every one of which was noted by
the ancients.
These degrees are known in Sanskrit as lokas or places in a
metaphysical sense. Human life is very varied as to character and other
potentialities, and for each of these the appropriate place after death is
provided, thus making kama loka an infinitely varied sphere.
In life some of the differences among men are modified and some
inhibited by a similarity of body and heredity, but in kama loka
all the hidden desires and passions are let loose in consequence of the absence
of body, and for that reason the state is vastly more diversified than the life
plane.
Not only is it necessary to provide for the natural varieties and
differences, but also for those caused by the manner of death, about which
something shall be said. And all these various divisions are but the natural
result of the life thoughts and last thoughts of the persons who die on earth.
It is beyond the scope of this work to go into a description of all these
degrees, inasmuch as volumes would be needed to describe them, and then but few
would understand.
THE BODY OF DESIRE
To deal with kama loka compels us to deal also with the fourth
principle in the classification of man's constitution, and arouses a conflict
with modern ideas and education on the subject of the desires and passions.
It is generally supposed that the desires and passions are inherent tendencies
in the individual, and they have an altogether unreal and misty appearance for
the ordinary student.
But in this system of philosophy they are not merely inherent in the
individual nor are they due to the body per se. While the man is living
in the world the desires and passions — the principle kama — have no
separate life apart from the astral and inner man, being, so to say, diffused
throughout his being.
But as they coalesce with the astral body after death and thus form an
entity with its own term of life, though without soul, very important questions
arise.
During mortal life the desires and passions are guided by the mind and
soul; after death they work without guidance from the former master; while we
live we are responsible for them and their effects, and when we have left this
life we are still responsible, although they go on working and making effects
on others while they last as the sort of entity I have described, and without
our direct guidance.
In this is seen the continuance of responsibility. They are a portion of
the skandhas — well known in eastern philosophy — which are the aggregates
that make up the man.
The body includes one set of the skandhas, the astral man
another, the kama principle is another set, and still others pertain to
other parts. In kama are the really active and important ones which
control rebirths and lead to all the varieties of life and circumstance upon
each rebirth.
They are being made from day to day under the law that every thought
combines instantly with one of the elemental forces of nature, becoming to that
extent an entity which will endure in accordance with the strength of the
thought as it leaves the brain, and all of these are inseparably connected with
the being who evolved them.
There is no way of escaping; all we can do is to have thoughts of good
quality, for the highest of the Masters themselves are not exempt from this
law, but they "people their current in space" with entities powerful
for good alone.
Now in kama loka this mass of desire and thought exists very
definitely until the conclusion of its disintegration, and then the remainder
consists of the essence of these skandhas, connected, of course, with
the being that evolved and had them. They can no more be done away with than we
can blot out the universe.
Hence they are said to remain until the being comes out of devachan,
and then at once by the law of attraction they are drawn to the being, who from
them as germ or basis builds up a new set of skandhas for the new life.
Kama loka therefore is distinguished from the earth plane by reason of the
existence therein, uncontrolled and unguided, of the mass of passions and
desires; but at the same time earth-life is also a kama loka, since it
is largely governed by the principle kama, and will be so until at a far
distant time in the course of evolution the races of men shall have developed
the fifth and sixth principle, thus throwing kama into its own sphere
and freeing earth-life from its influence.
The astral man in kama loka is a mere shell devoid of soul and
mind, without conscience and also unable to act unless vivified by forces
outside of itself. It has that which seems like an animal or automatic
consciousness due wholly to the very recent association with the human Ego.
For under the principle laid down in another chapter, every atom going
to make up the man has a memory of its own which is capable of lasting a length
of time in proportion to the force given it.
In the case of a very material and gross or selfish person the force
lasts longer than in any other, and hence in that case the automatic
consciousness will be more definite and bewildering to one who without
knowledge dabbles with necromancy.
Its purely astral portion contains and carries the record of all that
ever passed before the person when living, for one of the qualities of the
astral substance is to absorb all scenes and pictures and the impressions of
all thoughts, to keep them, and to throw them forth by reflection when the
conditions permit.
This astral shell, cast off by every man at death, would be a menace to
all men were it not in every case, except one which shall be mentioned, devoid
of all the higher principles which are the directors. But those guiding
constituents being disjoined from the shell, it wavers and floats about from
place to place without any will of its own, but governed wholly by attractions
in the astral and magnetic fields.
It is possible for the real man — called the spirit by some — to
communicate with us immediately after death for a few brief moments, but, those
passed, the soul has no more to do with earth until reincarnated.
What can and do influence the sensitive and the medium from out of this
sphere are the shells I have described.
Soulless and conscienceless, these in no sense are the spirits of our
deceased ones. They are the clothing thrown off by the inner man, the brutal
earthly portion discarded in the flight to devachan, and so have always
been considered by the ancients as devils — our personal devils — because
essentially astral, earthly, and passional.
It would be strange indeed if this shell, after being for so long the
vehicle of the real man on earth, did not retain an automatic memory and
consciousness. We see the decapitated body of the frog or the cock moving and
acting for a time with a seeming intelligence, and why is it not possible for
the finer and more subtle astral form to act and move with a far greater amount
of seeming mental direction?
(And in fact, more bad the person has
been, and more his kama-rupa will keep most of his personality.)
THE REVITALIZATION OF THE
KAMA-RUPA
Existing in the sphere of kama loka, as, indeed, also in all
parts of the globe and the solar system, are the elementals or nature forces.
They are innumerable, and their divisions are almost infinite, as they are, in
a sense, the nerves of nature.
Each class has its own work just as has every natural element or thing.
As fire burns and as water runs down and not up under their general law, so the
elementals act under law, but being higher in the scale than gross fire or
water their action seems guided by mind.
Some of them have a special relation to mental operations and to the
action of the astral organs, whether these be joined to a body or not. When a
medium forms the channel, and also from other natural coordination, these
elementals make an artificial connection with the shell of a deceased person,
aided by the nervous fluid of the medium and others near, and then the shell is
galvanized into an artificial life.
Through the medium connection is made with the physical and psychical
forces of all present. The old impressions on the astral body give up their
images to the mind of the medium, the old passions are set on fire.
Various messages and reports are then obtained from it, but not one of
them is original, not one is from the spirit. By their strangeness, and in
consequence of the ignorance of those who dabble in it, this is mistaken for
the work of spirit, but it is all from the living when it is not the mere
picking out from the astral light of the images of what has been in the past.
In certain cases to be noted there is an intelligence at work that is
wholly and intensely bad, to which every medium is subject, and which will
explain why so many of them have succumbed to evil, as they have confessed.
A rough classification of these shells that visit mediums would be as follows:
1) Those of the recently deceased whose place of burial is not far away.
This class will be quite coherent in accordance with the life and thought of
the former owner. An unmaterial, good, and spiritualized person leaves a shell
that will soon disintegrate. A gross, mean, selfish, material person's shell
will be heavy, consistent, and long lived: and so on with all varieties.
2) Those of persons who had died far away from the place where the
medium is. Lapse of time permits such to escape from the vicinity of their old
bodies, and at the same time brings on a greater degree of disintegration which
corresponds on the astral plane to putrefaction on the physical.
These are vague, shadowy, incoherent; respond but briefly to the psychic
stimulus, and are whirled off by any magnetic current. They are galvanized for
a moment by the astral currents of the medium and of those persons present who
were related to the deceased.
(What I have read is that more the shell
is disintegrating, and more its conversation becomes incoherent until it only
utters a few meaningless words.)
3) Purely shadowy remains which can hardly be given a place. There is no
English to describe them, though they are facts in this sphere. They might be
said to be the mere mold or impress left in the astral substance by the once
coherent shell long since disintegrated.
They are therefore so near being fictitious as to almost deserve the
designation. As such shadowy photographs they are enlarged, decorated, and
given an imaginary life by the thoughts, desires, hopes, and imaginings of
medium and sitters at the seance.
4) Definite, coherent entities, human souls bereft of the spiritual tie,
now tending down to the worst state of all, avichi, where annihilation
of the personality is the end. They are known as black magicians. Having
centered the consciousness in the principle of kama, preserved
intellect, divorced themselves from spirit, they are the only damned beings we
know.
In life they had human bodies and reached their awful state by
persistent lives of evil for its own sake; some of such already doomed to
become what I have described, are among us on earth today.
These are not ordinary shells, for they have centered all their force in
kama, thrown out every spark of good thought or aspiration, and have a
complete mastery of the astral sphere.
I put them in the classification of shells because they are such in the
sense that they are doomed to disintegration consciously as the others are to the
same end mechanically only.
They may and do last for many centuries, gratifying their lusts through
any sensitive they can lay hold of where bad thought gives them an opening.
They preside at nearly all seances, assuming high names and
taking the direction so as to keep the control and continue the delusion of the
medium, thus enabling themselves to have a convenient channel for their own
evil purposes.
Indeed, with the shells of suicides, of those poor wretches who die at
the hand of the law, of drunkards and gluttons, these black magicians living in
the astral world hold the field of physical mediumship and are liable to invade
the sphere of any medium no matter how good. The door once open, it is open to
all.
This class of shell has lost higher manas, but in the struggle
not only after death but as well in life the lower portion of manas
which should have been raised up to godlike excellence was torn away from its
lord and now gives this entity intelligence which is devoid of spirit but power
to suffer as it will when its final day shall come.
PEOPLE WHO DIE BEFORE THE
EXPECTED
In the state of Kama Loka suicides and those who are suddenly
shot out of life by accident or murder, legal or illegal, pass a term almost
equal to the length life would have been but for the sudden termination.
These are not really dead. To bring on a normal death, a factor not
recognized by medical science must be present. That is, the principles of the
being as described in other chapters have their own term of cohesion, at the
natural end of which they separate from each other under their own laws.
This involves the great subject of the cohesive forces of the human
subject, requiring a book in itself. I must be content therefore with the
assertion that this law of cohesion obtains among the human principles. Before
that natural end the principles are unable to separate.
Obviously the normal destruction of the cohesive force cannot be brought
about by mechanical processes except in respect to the physical body. Hence a
suicide, or person killed by accident or murdered by man or by order of human
law, has not come to the natural termination of the cohesion among the other
constituents, and is hurled into the kama loka state only partly dead.
There the remaining principles have to wait until the actual natural life term
is reached, whether it be one month or sixty years.
But the degrees of kama loka provide for the many varieties of
the last-mentioned shells. Some pass the period in great suffering, others in a
dreamy sort of sleep, each according to the moral responsibility. But executed
criminals are in general thrown out of life full of hate and revenge, smarting
under a penalty they do not admit the justice of.
They are ever rehearsing in kama loka their crime, their trial,
their execution, and their revenge. And whenever they can gain touch with a
sensitive living person, medium or not, they attempt to inject thoughts of
murder and other crime into the brain of such unfortunate. And that they
succeed in such attempts the deeper students of Theosophy full well know.
~ *
~
We have now approached devachan. After a certain time in kama
loka the being falls into a state of unconsciousness which precedes the
change into the next state. It is like the birth into life, preluded by a term
of darkness and heavy sleep. It then wakes to the joys of devachan. »
(The Ocean of
Theosophy, chapter 12)
ANNEX
To complement the topic, I add the William Judge’s answers to two questions
about the Kama-Loka.
First question:
Do earthly friends recognize one another during their passage through KamaLoka?
If so, who or what is the recognizer?
Answer: Kama-Loka being a state and not a
place, there is no “passage” through it. No doubt in some cases, if two beings
are in the Kama-Loka state at the same time, and for similar reasons, and with
the same magnetic currents, they may recognize each other.
But as Kama-Loka is the state in
which the Soul is freeing itself from the astral body and the passions and
desires, it cannot with ease be concerned with any other process than that one;
and hence, in the sense of the question as put, there is no recognition,
although the being has what it may suppose to be a recognition of friends and
enemies.
In Kama-Loka all its old thoughts
take shape, and torment the soul if the life has been evil, or merely
temporarily detain it if the opposite has been the case.
(Echoes of the Orient II, p.305)
Second question:
Are the majority of people, those
who are neither very wicked nor very spiritual, conscious in KamaLoka that
they are dead; and are they able to see the Kamic sights with which it is said
to be filled? I have read Stanton’s Dreams
of the Dead* and although I cannot accept all he says, the information
gained from other sources has been too meager to permit of my discriminating
accurately between what is true and what is false.
[* Stanton, Edward, Dreams of the
Dead, Boston, Lee and Shepard, 1892.]
Answer: Precisely as physicians know that
every human body has its own physical idiosyncrasies, which are well known in
their effects upon and relations with medicine, so in the state after death the
idiosyncrasy of the person has an effect upon the state there.
There is no positive or definite
rule which applies invariably to every being after death. Consequently there
are many different kinds of states in “Kama-Loka.” Some people are aware that
they left the earth, others are un aware of it; some are able to see those they
have left behind, others not; and certainly everybody in Kama-Loka is able to
see all that pertains to the particular division of that state in which he may
be at the time.
Mr. Stanton’s book is excellent
in many respects, but cannot be exhaustive. What he describes is beyond doubt
what happens to some persons in Kama-Loka, but he by no means describes all the
possible cases or facts of that state. But one thing may be asserted as
positively so, or else the whole system is at fault, and that is that the being
in Kama-Loka sees whatever pertains to the state in which he is, as it is all a
question of state.
(Echoes of the Orient II, p.333)
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