NATURE AND CHARACTERISTICS OF THE DEVACHAN

NATURE AND CHARACTERISTICS OF THE DEVACHAN

Why should it be supposed that devachan is a monotonous condition only because some one moment of earthly sensation is indefinitely perpetuated — stretched, so to say, throughout aeons? It is not, it cannot be so. . . .

Then — how can you think that "but one moment of earthly sensation only is selected for perpetuation?" Very true, that "moment" lasts from the first to last; but then it lasts but as the key-note of the whole harmony, a definite tone of appreciable pitch, around which cluster and develop in progressive variations of melody and as endless variations on a theme, all the aspirations, desires, hopes, dreams, which, in connection with that particular "moment" had ever crossed the dreamer's brain during his lifetime, without having ever found their realization on earth, and which he now finds fully realized in all their vividness in devachan, without ever suspecting that all that blissful reality is but the progeny begotten by his own fancy, the effects of the mental causes produced by himself. That particular one moment which will be most intense and uppermost in the thoughts of his dying brain at the time of dissolution will of course regulate all the other "moments." — The Mahatma Letters, pp. 191-2

One of nature's laws is that an entity cannot continue the same forever; for it is by exchanging the imperfect for the ever more perfect that we grow; and death is just such a change. The child must die in order to become a man, and the man must die frequently in order to become a god. There are many wonderful things around us of which we are cognizant all the time, and yet they are so commonplace that we do not draw the necessary deductions from them. Except the seed die, the plant cannot come into being. Except the man die, he cannot experience those postmortem conditions of thought and consciousness which belong to his inner being, to the celestial spirit which he is in his essence.
Death is the most familiar thing in nature, yet it is the most feared because the least understood. We have all entered life by the gateway of birth, and because it is behind us we do not fear birth. But we look with apprehension toward that day when we shall go through the solemn change of death and be free.
After death we are going to be exactly as we have made ourselves during life. If we have lived a decent life, we shall be a decent entity after death; and if we have lived like a beast, we are then going to be a beastly entity, and will have to take what is coming to us. We are neither going to be saved from the consequences of our past life, nor are we going to be eternally damned. There is no heaven, there is no hell, in the old theological sense. But there are postmortem states of many kinds, almost infinitely numerous; and because of nature's harmonious procedures no human being could ever die and be drawn to a condition or place in which he is unfitted to be. No miracles will be wrought for us at our death. No unnatural things, whether good or bad, are going to happen to us; nothing can occur outside of the unerring laws of the universe. A man goes to the particular lokas or talas in the interior worlds which during his life on earth he has fitted himself temporarily to inhabit. He makes for himself his own post-mortem destiny: good, bad, or indifferent.
When the second death supervenes, there is release from bondage for the intermediate nature of man, and the spirit-soul returns to its native realms, with the intermediate nature resting within it while undergoing a process of spiritual recuperation, of assimilation and mental digesting of the lessons learned in the life just lived. As the physical body rebuilds its energies during sleep, so the intermediate nature of man likewise has its own 'sleep' or devachan after each incarnation. Because the states of the consciousness of excarnate entities are many and various, the devachan may be considered as a hierarchical 'ladder' running downwards from the most spiritual to the least spiritual states, and imperceptibly remerging into the highest or most ethereal realms of the kama-loka.
Death is a casting off of limitations and fetters, a dropping of body after body, each one being more ethereal than the last. The more spiritual portion of the reincarnating ego frees itself of the ethereal bodies of man's inner constitution and, entering into its divine parent, the heart of the monadic essence, pursues its peregrinations through the sacred planets, finally passing the portals of the sun into realms and spheres of unspeakable glory.
As to the divine spark itself, it really is always free, even during life, except for its connection with the various vehicles through which it works. It is the central illuminating fire at the very core of man's spiritual essence, and simply sends its splendor down through enshrouding veil after veil until the tip of that descending ray touches the physical brain, giving it light and life.
The devachan, as a series of states of consciousness, is not in any sense a loka, or particular world or sphere. It is in the same category as the still sublimer states of consciousness called nirvana, and in the opposite direction as the avichi, which is also a series of conditions of consciousness of the beings therein. We can imagine a ladder or continuity of states of consciousness of which every rung is one such; and we can divide this ladder into three distinct parts. The highest is the nirvana, which, since there are many types of nirvanis, we may divide into seven or even twelve rungs or conditions. The second part we may call the devachan, in its turn divisible into its series of states of consciousness. (1) Underneath this last come the seven or twelve conditions of consciousness of avichi.
These three parts of the all-inclusive ladder of consciousnesses blend into each other, so that the lowest condition of the nirvana merges into the highest of the devachan; and, similarly, the lowest devachanic state passes insensibly into the highest condition of consciousness in the kama-loka; and again the lowest of the kama-lokic states of consciousness blends into the highest of the avichi. Now the inclusion of the kama-loka with the states of consciousness of the series should not be misunderstood to mean that it is not also a series of lokas. (2) I am speaking here of the beings in the kama-loka, whose states of consciousness, as a class, form the link between the avichi-conditions and the superior consciousnesses in the devachan into which the kama-lokic entities pass when their consciousness is no longer held in the kama-loka.
Devachan is a period of spiritual and loftily intellectual flowering of immaterial energies which could find no adequate self-expression during life. These energies produce their effect on the fabric of character of the dreaming entity which experiences and thus assimilates and digests them. In fact, these spiritual and intellectual expansions of consciousness mold and modify the character of the excarnate ego even more than does the life on earth. In these respects the latter, therefore, can be viewed as a 'world of causes,' while the devachan is a 'world of effects.'
The devachanic condition for the average human being who has lived a creditably aspiring and moral life, is one of inexpressible spiritual and mental beauty and peace. Every high aspiration and unfulfilled desire to do good find their opportunity for expression in his consciousness, so that his devachan is filled with a glorification of all the noblest that he had hoped to do on earth — involving almost infinite variations on the fundamental thought-themes as the creative faculties of the ego work upon them.
Is there progress for the ego in devachan? It depends upon the meaning we attach to the word. If we think of it as a process of gradual assimilation and digestion of all that the entity has experienced and gathered into its consciousness during life on earth, then it can be said that there is 'progress' in the devachanic states. (3) But if by progress is meant the progress evolving of faculty and its use, and that the devachan is a sphere of originating spiritual causes which impel the entity then or later to further evolution, then there is none.
The reason why some spheres have been called spheres of causes, and others spheres of effects, is because of the difference between actions of will and thought inaugurated by a sevenfold entity, such as a fully incarnated man, and the dreaming state of a devachani which is but a threefold being — consisting of the upper duad plus the aroma or spiritual flowering, mentally and psychically speaking, of the man that was. It takes a complete septenary entity to become a real causer of effects in his own world which, in so far as the entity is concerned, is the sphere of causes. The same rule applies to beings of any and all planes, and to any locality, visible or invisible, in the cosmos. Wherever a septenary or duodenary entity acts or lives, that sphere for him is his world of causes, and when his term of imbodiment is over, his rest period becomes his world of effects.
It is clear that the human consciousness, having the range of a sevenfold constitution, is thereby working in a wider sphere than when it is restricted to the dreaming illusion of the human monad asleep in its devachan. In other words, when living on earth — although we are in the maya of incarnated existence — we have the chance of coming in touch with our spiritual and manasic creative self. As septenary entities we can, if we so will, throw off the maya and function in any part of our constitution as a causing, intellectually awakened, complete being. On the other hand, the devachani is a threefold entity only; and whereas most of the devachanic experiences are mayavi, to the dreaming ego they are perfect illusions and therefore have the appearance of reality, so that he revels in the notion that he is achieving wonderful results.
In fact, the devachanic dreams are incomparably more real than anything that our imperfect physical senses can report to us, because the human ego experiencing them is living in the realms of pure thought and spiritual consciousness, where relatively nothing dims the dreaming cognition of the fulfillment of its noblest ideals and aspirations. From this it follows that the devachan is not an objective sphere, but is in each and every case an individual condition of consciousness, always exactly correspondential to the dominating flow of the man's consciousness during his imbodied life.
Thus, the reimbodying ego in the devachan will follow in its consciousness those particular trains of spiritual and intellectual thought and feeling which were most dominant but had the least chance of fulfillment in the life just ended. But as the devachanic states are conditions of rest and bliss without the slightest possibility of suffering or misery, all the 'dreams' of the ego are of the loftiest and most ecstatically beautiful kind possible to the innate energies of the then active consciousness.
One of the greatest illusions held by the majority of mankind today is the notion that when those whom we love die, we have lost contact with them; and even many who believe that they will meet their loved ones again in a future life on earth, labor under the same illusion. Now it is most emphatically not true that the spirit can ever return after death in order to communicate with the living in any manner whatsoever. Outside of the positive cruelty both to the deceased and to the ones left behind, and quite outside of the extraordinarily materialistic atmosphere of this idea, it should be apparent that a disimbodied spirit cannot at any time nor in any circumstance 'descend' to earth. For after death, and after the various processes of casting off the pranic sheaths in the kama-loka, the human ego rises into its devachanic repose, and thereafter it is unapproachable by anything save what is of its own character or lofty spiritual type. It is in just this last phrase that lies the reason why we need never think that we lose all spiritual communion with those whom we have loved; for the higher parts of our being can at any moment by means of vibrational sympathy conjoin its vibrations with those of the devachani, and thus temporarily become at one with it. As H.P.B. writes in The Key to Theosophy (p. 150):

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 Devachanee, 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.

I may add that if indeed there be a truly spiritual love, there need not ever be any striving to commune with the one who has passed on, for such impersonal love will quite automatically rise to the devachani, and will give the inner conviction to the one on earth that the link is not broken.
The devachani is protected by nature's own laws. Nothing of earth can reach it, for the akasic veil which the devachanic entity has woven around itself, like the cocoon of the yet unborn butterfly, shields it against the intrusion of anything whatsoever beneath its own heights of consciousness. It is spiritual love only which can rise to inner communion with those who have preceded us; no love which has aught of the personal or selfish in it can ever reach the devachanic states. However, it is my earnest belief that it is incomparably better not even to attempt to enter into communion with the devachani, because the love of very few of us is of so pure and holy a character as to be fit, or even able, to ascend to that high level of impersonality.
The devachani is under the guardianship of spiritual entities, nature's own masters, and no human, however high his degree, would ever intrude; and, indeed, the higher the degree the less would be the impulse to trespass upon the holy mystery of the devachan.

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LENGTH OF THE DEVACHANIC PERIOD

There are no clocks, no timepieces in devachan. . . . though the whole Cosmos is a gigantic chronometer in one sense. Nor do we, mortals, — ici bas meme — take much, if any, cognizance of time during periods of happiness and bliss, and find them ever too short; a fact that does not in the least prevent us from enjoying that happiness all the same — when it does come. Have you ever given a thought to this little possibility that, perhaps, it is because their cup of bliss is full to its brim, that the "devachanee" loses "all sense of the lapse of time"; and that it is something that those who land in Avitchi do not, though as much as the devachanee, the Avitchee has no cognizance of time — i.e., of our earthly calculations of periods of time? I may also remind you in this connection that time is something created entirely by ourselves; . . . Finite similes are unfit to express the abstract and the infinite; nor can the objective ever mirror the subjective. To realize the bliss in devachan, or the woes in Avitchi, you have to assimilate them — as we do. — The Mahatma Letters, pp. 193-4

There is a law in occultism, based entirely on the operations of nature, that the human entity does not normally reincarnate under one hundred times the number of years lived on earth. The average life span at the present time is said to be some fifteen years, but this is only a statistical average, and there are of course millions of people who live to be much older than that, and their devachanic period will thus be correspondingly longer. Yet every ego's devachan is individual to itself, both as regards character and time-length. Some human beings are in the devachan far longer than 1500 years, whereas others of strongly materialistic bent and attributes have a devachan of possibly only a few hundred years. (4)
It may seem to be a waste of time to spend so many years in the devachan; but, as a matter of fact, there are hundreds of thousands of human beings around us who are in a semi-devachanic state, so full of daydreamings that we speak of them as being impractical, dreamy, visionary, etc. The cause of this condition lies in the desire of the sleeping seeds of character to return to earth, a desire awaking prematurely in the devachan as seeds of impulse, of thought and of passion, thereby shortening the devachanic term before it has reached its full karmic end. Faint dreams of the glory that was experienced thus remain with the reincarnating ego; and to the degree to which the brain-mind consciousness is affected by these memories, is the entity still in devachan. This condition is not good, for such men are not fully awake and their partial devachanic state prevents the reincarnating ego from being alert to its opportunities to grow and expand while on earth. We should shake off the tendency to dream our life away, by being spiritually and mentally active, and being so with a will, and by aspiring to be ever nobler. The mere study of books, while valuable in its way, will not do it. It is the spiritual nature which should be cultivated under all conditions, even in the intricate affairs of human existence.
There are likewise individuals living on earth, although vastly fewer in number, who are really in one of the higher states of avichi — who are, as it were, haunted by continuously recurring 'dreams' of misery and horror. And, by contrast, there are sublime human beings who even while in the body are in one or more of the lower planes of the nirvana; but these are very rare.
The ordinary man, could he escape the devachan by some work of magic, would probably return to earth a semi-idiot, because his intermediate nature would be so tired and his energy so depleted, that he would be very much like one who has gone without sleep for so long that he is in a condition of physical exhaustion and mental stupor. Nevertheless, every neophyte whose spiritual yearning is to give himself to the grand labors of the Hierarchy of Compassion, is helped in every way possible to evolve quickly, so that his devachan becomes less and less with each incarnation; and finally he reaches the point where the devachan is not really necessary — except for brief periods. Yet even the most advanced must have at least a temporary surcease and oblivion for psychological and mental recuperation; the time comes when the inner constitution can stand no more strain. (5)
Devachan is strictly the mathematical resultant of one's spiritual state at the moment of death. The more spiritual the man, up to a certain point, the longer his devachan; the more materialistic he is, the shorter it is. There is a way, however, by which the devachan can indeed be greatly shortened: the way of dedication, of renunciation of the self in the cause of the Buddhas of Compassion. The choice is ours — if we are evolved enough to exercise that choice with the strength of will to make it effectual. Even the making of that choice will shorten the devachanic period. (6)
Another reason why the devachanic periods are so long to us is that man is an imbodied ray from the spiritual monad, which monad must have its full time for the purposes of the postmortem peregrinations; and these can take place only when its link through the egoic ray with earth (or with other worlds or globes) has been broken, thus freeing it for adventures in other spheres. These reincarnations of ours are very, very far from being the 'whole show' — and we should note here that the periods of both manifestation and rest of a globe of a planetary chain are of equal duration. The key to this mystery lies in the fact that the human ego is a monad or spiritual being in its own spheres where its larger destiny is, and contacts these lower realms of matter only on the occasions of incarnation by a projection of an egoic ray which makes the 'man' we know. (7)
It is quite understandable that active normal human beings almost instinctively resent the idea of passing nearly one hundred times as long in the sleeping-dreaming devachanic state as in the self-conscious cognition and activity of imbodied life. Yet the devachani is not 'lazing' its time away, because the releasing of the human monad from the bonds of earth life gives it — the real man — the time and opportunity to perform its most needed and inevitable peregrinations of destiny.
The life of the earth-man, being but a phase of the human monad's manvantaric existence, is not a standard of comparison; nor is it the most important basis from which the human monad's peregrinations take their beginning. The exact reverse is the case, for the human monad's ray, which produces the earth-man, is but the occasional projection of consciousness from the human monad, whose sphere of activity is not only our planetary chain, but also, because of its link with the spiritual monad, the solar system. Hence its ray's repetitive imbodiments on earth are but phases of the cycle of peregrination, its far larger span of life being in and on the invisible globes of our chain.
Nature in the long run makes no great mistakes, and the time spent in the devachan is in each case equated by nature's invariable laws to the needs and spiritual and intellectual health and stability of the evolving ego. Hence it is philosophically inaccurate to regard as overlong or unnecessary the length of time passed by the ego in devachan. Such lengthy time periods are absolutely required by the human monad, not only for its peregrinations, but for the assimilation of the devachanic entity's past experiences as an imbodied man.
For the devachani there is no realization of the passing of time as the earth-man experiences it. To us here, our sense of time is very strong, because of the continuous succession of events which in our consciousness mark off and produce our conception of time periods, such as our days and nights and the seasons, as well as the phases of human thought and feeling in which the consciousness of the projected ray is sunken and bound psychologically. But in the devachan all these things vanish as exterior impacts upon us. It is very much like what happens to a man who has a deep sleep; whether he is in the strongly dreaming consciousness of the swapna, or in the dreamless sleep of the sushupti, he has no sense whatsoever of the passage of exterior time, so that when he awakens he is scarcely able to say whether he has slept two or eight hours. Even more so is it with the devachani. For him, time is no more, except in the dreaming sense of the succession of images of thought and blissful imaginings which infill his consciousness. In the higher and highest realms of the devachan even the unutterably beautiful visionings fade into something loftier still, which to our imbodied human consciousness is 'unconsciousness' — or the true sushupti.
Of course, in the far distant future, when the human race shall have evolved so high spiritually and intellectually that it will have passed beyond the need of the devachan, these rest periods will no longer occur. The monad will probably simply step from one then ethereal earth-body into another with scarcely a break in self-consciousness.
We have already mentioned the four general states in which the human consciousness can be. First, jagrat, the waking consciousness; then swapna, the sleep with dreams; and the reason we do not remember our dreams better is because they are often too ethereal and too intense for the brain to hold the record thereof after we awake. It is not because they are too faint. Again, when a man sleeps and is utterly unconscious, this condition is sushupti. It is a consciousness so keen, so spiritual, with reaches so vast, that the poor limited brain — its physical substance as well as the astral substance of the brain-mind — cannot hold or record it.
The fourth and highest state which we as humans can attain is turiya-samadhi, and this is virtually the consciousness of the divine within us. If the sushupti state is so powerful that our brain cannot recall it, a thousand times more may this be said of the turiya condition. It is somewhat like our feeble brain trying to cognize the consciousness of the hierarch of our solar universe. All these states of consciousness can be, and in extremely rare cases are, experienced by men even when imbodied on earth.
Now when a man dies, he passes from the jagrat into the swapna so far as his astral body is concerned. His human soul is unconscious in sushupti; but the spirit within him, which has gone to its parent source until recalled to earth again, is in turiya-samadhi. In future ages when we shall be demigods on earth, adumbrations of this divine consciousness will be familiar to all of us. We then shall understand because we shall know. Even today, where is the man who cannot have some inkling of the sublime? Every normal human being, if he so train himself, can raise his consciousness, his real self, and center it in the higher part of his being; and then, when he speaks, his word is truth and carries conviction.

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DEVACHAN AND THE GLOBES OF THE PLANETARY CHAIN

He would say: "Verily as far as extends this Akasa, so far is the akasa within the heart. Within this akasa are contained both heaven and earth, both fire (agni) and air (vayu), both sun and moon, both lightning and the stars, as well as whatever here is and is not — all this world is contained in that (akasa)."

He would say: "That does not become decrepit with old age, nor with death is it slain. That is truly the abode of Brahman (Brahmapura) — in it are contained all wishes. It is the Self (atman), free from evil, ageless, deathless, sorrowless, hungerless, thirstless, whose desire is truth, whose resolve is truth." — Chhandogya-Upanishad, VIII, i, 3, 5

Every one of the seven manifest globes of our planetary chain has its own characteristic kama-loka or astral atmosphere surrounding it. When the imbodied beings of a life-wave on a globe die, the accumulated attractions brought about by imbodiment have to be cast off in the kama-loka of that globe. Obviously the lower the globe in the planetary chain, the grosser and coarser is its kama-loka; and the higher it is, the more ethereal is its astral world.
Hence, when a human being dies, he has his second death in the earth's kama-loka, i.e. in the earth's aura, during which process the human monad, rapidly or slowly according to the individual, drops first the grossest, and finally the least gross life-atoms and the corresponding attractions which keep it in the astral kama-loka. The culmination of this purgatorial cleansing or gestation (8) is the second death, which means that the human monad has arrived at the point of casting off the last vestiges of its astral clothing, or what remains of its kama-rupa. From this moment it begins to glide into the devachanic condition.
As the radiance, which is the efflux from the reimbodying ego, ascends towards its Father in Heaven, the spiritual monad, it passes through different spheres of being in the interior worlds. In each of these it pauses for a varying period of time, in order to shed the life-atoms which are native to that sphere and are of too substantial a character to be gathered into this radiance, so that it may journey farther to still loftier and more spiritual spheres.
This passage of the peregrinating monad up the ascending arc of our planetary chain continues until globe G is reached. (Similarly, the monad passes through globes A, B, and C on the descending arc on its return to a new incarnation on our earth globe.) In each globe it has at least one imbodiment before it goes on: a birth, a maturity, a death. The superior globes on the ascending arc are very much higher than our globe D, both in spiritual status and in the types of entities living there, so that the very beasts on globes F and G, and almost so on globe E, are far higher than men are on this earth. (9)
Some human entities do not fully enter into their devachanic state until they have left globe G. Others slip into the devachan after the temporary sojourn on globe E or possibly globe F, while still others enter their devachan more or less completely even before reaching globe E. These several kinds of entrances into the devachan exemplify different grades in perfection of the gestation period undergone by the disincarnate entities. Thus individual cases vary greatly, but for the large majority of human beings the devachanic sleep begins after the second death in the earth's kama-loka, as the monad enters the sphere of the next globe; and this sleep grows steadily deeper and more ecstatic, until finally the entity has become utterly oblivious of anything except its devachanic dreams.
With regard to the character of the imbodiments which the peregrinating monad undergoes on globes E, F, and G of the ascending arc, and those that the monad returning to incarnation has to make on the three manifest globes of the descending arc, A, B, C, the question may well be asked: are these imbodiments those of different egos that the spiritual monad has emanated from itself, or are they actually imbodiments, however temporary, of the human monad? (10)
Now it will be impossible to grasp the true teaching in this connection if our ideas are too heavily crystallized around the notion that there is but one monad within the human constitution, when in fact it is built up of several monads in different degrees of evolutionary unfolding. We are here dealing with the subtle and flowing nature of consciousness: with the monad as a center of consciousness, rather than as a being 'occupying space' much as this apple occupies space on the desk before me.
When the human monad begins its devachan in the kama-loka of earth, it falls asleep in the bosom of the spiritual monad, and is carried thus in its parent monad up through the globes of the ascending arc before it finally leaves our chain to make its peregrinations through the different planetary chains on the outer round. In order to do this, it obviously must pass through these globes, for each is a station on its outward peregrination, and it can omit none. Just as a traveler on a train is unaware of the stations passed through at night while he is asleep, but will be conscious when awake that he speeds by some stations and stops at others, just so on the various globes through which the spiritual monad passes, the human monad resting within it will either have a relative awakening — although always very slight — or none at all, every case depending upon its karma.
But we should not press the analogy too far. What actually happens is that those monadic qualities of consciousness, which will become relatively fully awake on the different globes when the general life-wave reaches them — these qualities (and not the full consciousness of the devachanic monad) are temporarily aroused into an illusory consciousness when such globes are passed through. These extrusions of qualities of consciousness are projected like thought-rays, and take temporary imbodiments on these globes which awaken them by their attractive pull. Such imbodiment is, of course, very imperfect and in a sense illusory, for the reason that the life-wave to which we belong is at present on earth and not on these higher globes.
Even in ordinary life we can find an illustration of the same partial functioning of consciousness; for it is not uncommon for a man to perform his duties or to be involved in his thoughts, and yet at the same time find his attention attracted to some other event or object; and, in a more or less evanescent fashion, a thought-ray is projected from his otherwise occupied mind, encompasses the event and very soon is again withdrawn into the man's consciousness. Or a man who is half-asleep is for the time living in two aspects of his consciousness: partly in the jagrat condition, partly in the swapna; and he is vaguely conscious of being in both states.
Nothing that has been said should be misconstrued to mean that the devachanic bliss of the main part of the consciousness of the human monad is disturbed or interrupted. It is only a thought-ray, so to speak, which is attracted forth by this or that globe and, after such evanescent projection, is indrawn again into the devachanic consciousness. All the after-death states are really functions of consciousness.
During the time when the human ego is sleeping within its parent monad, as the latter passes through the ascending arc of the planetary chain, the cognizing intelligence of the average human entity does not perceive or feel what is going on around it to any appreciable degree. Hence, there can be no bringing back of the fruitage of experiences on the other globes of the chain. The human monad as a whole is virtually unconscious of the fleeting imbodiments of a portion of its consciousness on the globes passed through. It is almost an automatic occurrence so far as the human monad is concerned; and when I speak of the human monad, I am referring to the lower part of the reincarnating ego.
From this rule of unconscious experiences on the other globes we should except the sixth rounders, and also, in degrees depending upon the respective individuals, those who are on their way to becoming fifth and sixth rounders. This exception applies likewise to those who succeed in passing the gateway of initiation; for, if one can do that, he will be a living jivanmukta, though for the time existing as a man. During the course of these initiations, the inner self of the initiant not only will wing its way to the other globes of our planetary chain, where he will gain firsthand experience by living there for the time being and by actually being a part of these globes, but he will also go out to the other planets and to the sun along the magnetic pathways of the universe.
In studying these teachings we should constantly endeavor to keep the processes of our thought and consciousness fluid, thus avoiding the danger of mental crystallization, or the perilous self-satisfaction of believing that there is 'not very much more to learn.' This feeling arises in the astral-material brain-mind, which dearly loves to pigeonhole facts — although, admittedly, having one's ideas in order is very necessary. The attempt to keep the mind fluid, while often making us uncomfortable, puts the brain-mind in its proper place and makes it a flexible servant instead of a rigid taskmaster.