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THE
OF
THEOSOPHY
A
Definitive Work on Theosophy
By
William
Quan Judge
CHAPTER 12
Kama Loka
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. 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.
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.
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?
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
co-ordination, 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.
(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 mould 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, avitchi, 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.
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.
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