Death-and After? Part 5

(d) _From Nirmanakayas._ For these communications, as for the two cla.s.ses next mentioned, the medium must be of a very pure and lofty nature. The Nirmanakaya is a perfected man, who has cast aside his physical body but retains his other lower principles, and remains in the earth-sphere for the sake of helping forward the evolution of mankind. Nirmanakayas

Have, out of pity for mankind and those they left on earth, renounced the Nirvanic state. Such an Adept, or Saint, or whatever you may call him, believing it a selfish act to rest in bliss while mankind groans under the burden of misery produced by ignorance, renounces Nirvana and determines to remain invisible _in spirit_ on this earth. They have no material body, as they have left it behind; but otherwise they remain with all their principles even _in astral life_ in our sphere. And such can and do communicate with a few elect ones, only surely not with _ordinary_ mediums.[52]

(e) _From Adepts now living on earth._ These often communicate with Their disciples, without using the ordinary methods of communication, and when any tie exists, perchance from some past incarnation, between an Adept and a medium, const.i.tuting that medium a disciple, a message from the Adept might readily be mistaken for a message from a "Spirit". The receipt of such messages by precipitated writing or spoken words is within the knowledge of some.

(f) _From the medium's Higher Ego._ Where a pure and earnest man or woman is striving after the light, this upward striving is met by a downward reaching of the higher nature, and light from the higher streams downward, illuminating the lower consciousness. Then the lower mind is, for the time, united with its parent, and transmits as much of its knowledge as it is able to retain.

From this brief sketch it will be seen how varied may be the sources from which communications apparently from "the other side of Death"

may be received. As said by H.P. Blavatsky:

The variety of the causes of phenomena is great, and one need be an Adept, and actually look into and examine what transpires, in order to be able to explain in each case what really underlies it.[53]

To complete the statement it may be added that what the average Soul can do when it has pa.s.sed through the gateway of Death, it can do on this side, and communications may be as readily obtained by writing, in trance, and by the other means of receiving messages, from embodied as from disembodied Souls. If each developed within himself the powers of his own Soul, instead of drifting about aimlessly, or ignorantly plunging into dangerous experiments, knowledge might be safely acc.u.mulated and the evolution of the Soul might be accelerated.

This one thing is sure: Man is to-day a living Soul, over whom Death has no power, and the key of the prison-house of the body is in his own hands, so that he may learn its use if he will. It is because his true Self, while blinded by the body, has lost touch with other Selves, that Death has been a gulf instead of a gateway between embodied and disembodied Souls.

APPENDIX.

The following pa.s.sage on the fate of suicides is taken from the _Theosophist_, September, 1882.

We do not pretend--we are not permitted--to deal exhaustively with the question at present, but we may refer to one of the most important cla.s.ses of ent.i.ties, who can partic.i.p.ate in objective phenomena, other than Elementaries and Elementals.

This cla.s.s comprises the Spirits of conscious sane suicides. They are _Spirits_, and not _Sh.e.l.ls_, because there is not in their cases, at any rate until later, a total and permanent divorce between the fourth and fifth principles on the one hand, and the sixth and seventh on the other. The two duads are divided, they exist apart, but a line of connection still unites them, they may yet reunite, and the sorely threatened personality avert its doom; the fifth principle still holds in its hands the clue by which, traversing the labyrinth of earthly sins and pa.s.sions, it may regain the sacred penetralia. But for the time, though really a Spirit, and therefore so designated, it is practically not far removed from a Sh.e.l.l.

This cla.s.s of Spirit can undoubtedly communicate with men, but, as a rule, its members have to pay dearly for exercising the privilege, while it is scarcely possible for them to do otherwise than lower and debase the moral nature of those with and through whom they have much communication. It is merely, broadly speaking, a question of degree; of much or little injury resulting from such communication; the cases in which real, permanent good can arise are too absolutely exceptional to require consideration.

Understand how the case stands. The unhappy being revolting against the trials of life--trials, the results of its own former actions, trials, heaven's merciful medicine for the mentally and spiritually diseased--determines, instead of manfully taking arms against a sea of troubles, to let the curtain drop, and, as it fancies, end them. It destroys the body, but finds itself precisely as much alive mentally as before. It had an appointed life-term determined by an intricate web of prior causes, which its own wilful sudden act cannot shorten.

That term must run out its appointed sands. You may smash the lower half of the hand hour-gla.s.s, so that the impalpable sand shooting from the upper bell is dissipated by the pa.s.sing aerial currents as it issues; but that stream will run on, unnoticed though it remain, until the whole store in that upper receptacle is exhausted.

So you may destroy the body, but not the appointed period of sentient existence, foredoomed (because simply the effect of a plexus of causes) to intervene before the dissolution of the personality; this must run on for its appointed period.

This is so in other cases, _e.g._, those of the victims of accident or violence; they, too, have to complete their life-term, and of these, too, we may speak on another occasion--but here it is sufficient to notice that, whether good or bad, their mental att.i.tude at the time of death alters wholly their subsequent position. They, too, have to wait on within the "Region of Desires" until their wave of life runs on to and reaches its appointed sh.o.r.e, but they wait on, wrapped in dreams soothing and blissful, or the reverse, according to their mental and moral state at, and prior to the fatal hour, but nearly exempt from further material temptations, and, broadly speaking, incapable (except just at the moment of real death) of communicating _scio motu_ with mankind, though not wholly beyond the possible reach of the higher forms of the "Accursed Science," Necromancy. The question is a profoundly abstruse one; it would be impossible to explain within the brief s.p.a.ce still remaining to us, how the conditions immediately after death differ so entirely as they do in the case (1) of the man who deliberately _lays down_ (not merely _risks_) his life from altruistic motives in the hope of saving those of others; and (2) of him who deliberately sacrifices his life from selfish motives, in the hope of escaping trials and troubles which loom before him. Nature or Providence, Fate, or G.o.d, being merely a self-adjusting machine, it would at first sight seem as if the results must be identical in both cases. But, machine though it be, we must remember that it is a machine _sui generis_--

Out of himself he span The eternal web of right and wrong; And ever feels the subtlest thrill, The slenderest thread along.

A machine compared with whose perfect sensitiveness and adjustment the highest human intellect is but a coa.r.s.e clumsy replica, _in petto_.

And we must remember that thoughts and motives are material, and at times marvellously potent material, forces, and we may then begin to comprehend why the hero, sacrificing his life on pure altruistic grounds, sinks as his life-blood ebbs away into a sweet dream, wherein

All that he wishes and all that he loves, Come smiling round his sunny way,

only to wake into active or objective consciousness when reborn in the Region of Happiness, while the poor unhappy and misguided mortal who, seeking to elude fate, selfishly loosens the silver string and breaks the golden bowl, finds himself terribly alive and awake, instinct with all the evil cravings and desires that embittered his world-life, without a body in which to gratify these, and capable of only such partial alleviation as is possible by more or less vicarious gratification, and this only at the cost of the ultimate complete rupture with his sixth and seventh principles, and consequent ultimate annihilation after, alas! prolonged periods of suffering.

Let it not be supposed that there is no hope for this cla.s.s--the sane deliberate suicide. If, bearing steadfastly his cross, he suffers patiently his punishment, striving against carnal appet.i.tes still alive in him, in all their intensity, though, of course, each in proportion to the degree to which it had been indulged in earth-life.

If, we say, he bears this humbly, never allowing himself to be tempted here or there into unlawful gratifications of unholy desires, then when his fated death-hour strikes, his four higher principles reunite, and, in the final separation that then ensues, it may well be that all may be well with him, and that he pa.s.ses on to the gestation period and its subsequent developments.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: Book ii., from lines 666-789. The whole pa.s.sage bristles with horrors.]

[Footnote 2: xii. 85. Trans., of Burnell and Hopkins.]

[Footnote 3: From the translation of Dhunjeebhoy Jamsetjee Medhora, _Zoroastrian and some other Ancient Systems_, xxvii.]

[Footnote 4: Trans., by Mirza Mohamed Hadi. _The Platonist_, 306.]

[Footnote 5: _The Sacred Books of the East_, iii, 109, 110.]

[Footnote 6: _Secret Doctrine_, vol. i. p. 281.]

[Footnote 7: See _ibid._, p. 283.]

[Footnote 8: _Isis Unveiled_, vol. i. p. 480.]

[Footnote 9: Theosophical Manuals, No. 1.]

[Footnote 10: _The Heroic Enthusiasts_, Trans., by L. Williams. part ii.

pp. 22, 23.]

[Footnote 11: _Cremation_, Theosophical Siftings, vol. iii.]

[Footnote 12: _Man: Fragments of Forgotten History_, pp. 119, 120.]

[Footnote 13: _Key to Theosophy_, H.P. Blavatsky, p. 109. Third Edition.]

[Footnote 14: _Magic, White and Black_, Dr. Franz Hartmann, pp. 109, 110. Third Edition.]

[Footnote 15: See _The Seven Principles of Man_, pp. 17-21.]

[Footnote 16: _Theosophist_, March, 1882, p. 158, note.]

[Footnote 17: _Essays upon some Controverted Questions_, p. 36.]

[Footnote 18: _Fortnightly Review_, 1892, p. 176.]

[Footnote 19: _Key to Theosophy_, p. 67.]

[Footnote 20: _Ibid._, p. 97.]

[Footnote 21: _Key to Theosophy_, p. 97]