DO WE GROW AND AGE ALSO IN HEAVEN?

When people asked him:

Are our human souls born as infants or as adults into the Devachanic state?

William Judge replied:

« It seems to me to be a mistake to consider questions relating to the soul from the materialistic point of view of “infant” or “adult.” The soul is not born, nor does it die; it cannot be called an infant or an adult; those terms should only be used as more or less metaphorical, to show, as the Editor points out, a difference in character.

The soul assumes in the astral or ethereal realms of being that shape or form which most resembles its real character: it may seem to be what we would call infant or adult irrespective of the age of the body it had just quitted, or it might take the form of a beast or maybe a deformed, misshapen human body if its real life could be but fitly thus represented.

This was well known to Swedenborg and many other seers, who saw souls wandering in such shapes which the very law of their being compelled them to assume. And it does not require physical death to bring this about, for in life many a person presents to the clairvoyant the actual picture of the inner character, no matter how horrible that may be.

Form, shape, or lineament has then in the life of the soul to do with essential character. It is reported that one of the Adepts writing of Devachan spoke of our growing old there and their [sic] dying out of it. But this means, as was also then explained, only the uprush of force, its continuance in activity, and then at last its gradual decline to extinction or birth into another life. »

(Echoes of the Orient II, p.359)

OBSERVATIONS

When Theosophy mentions that the human souls born, grow, age and die in Devachan, it is not in the sense as it occurs in the physical body on Earth, but it is an analogy to illustrate the process that the consciousness passes during its stay in the Devachan.

The consciousness begins first by arising in the devachanic state, then she develops and increases her forces until reaching her maximum expression, and later her forces begins to gradually decrease until finally they are extinguished, and then humans reincarnate again on Earth.

And Master Pasteur pointed out that in higher planes of existence, the soul takes the form of a luminous sphere, that is to say that she has no longer a physical appearance, but only a synthesis of the energies that radiate inside the soul.