English
At first the student of spiritual science will be apt to resent as unsatisfactory the self-centred, and, as it will seem to him, delusive character of the spiritual happi- ness thus attained by the normal human being reaching the Heaven I describe. Take the case of a person, say A, whose happiness is essentially dependent on the companionship of B. On the spiritual plane he has that happiness. But suppose the happiness of B has to do entirely with the companionship of C. In B’s thought-sphere A may have no place. So then it may be conceived A is self-deceived all the time—wrapped in a delusion which would be a cruel negation of happi- ness if he understood it. But this criticism is vitiated by the confusion it makes between externals and essentials. In thinking of companionship from the point of view of the earth life we are dealing with externals. We do not concern ourselves on this physical plane with the inner thought consciousness of the person beloved, nearly so much as with the external manifestation thereof; or, at all events, that is true of the common-place mortal. If it is not true of anyone Q 226 THE GROWTH OF THE SOUL. who may be reading these words, then the spiritual plane will shape itself to his higher spiritual evolution, as we shall see later on; but we must not criticise the scheme of Nature from one point of view only. Heaven,—meaning thereby blissful rest in a con- sciousness of that order which the soul is capable of, —imust somehow be provided for all, and not merely for persons of very highly refined intelligence; and assuming that A is a person on the humbler levels of humanity in this respect, how is he to be happy on the hypothesis we are dealing with except by means of an arrangement by which his aspirations take the shape of an apparent reality ? Is A to be condemned to have no heavenly bliss because his affections have been directed towards an external manifestation on this plane of life which is not in true spiritual union with his own consciousness ? He has not yet risen to a height of evolution in which spiritual existence per se consti- tutes the full fruition of happiness. A person is not essentially changed in his nature because he is trans- lated to a new plane of being. Our friend A set himself up with a delusive theory of happiness om earth if he centred his dream of bliss in an affection that by the hypothesis was one-sided. Is that mistake to embitter his whole experience of Heaven? He has not made the realisation of spiritual truth the object of his life ; he is denied nothing that he has sought in being left for the time without an exact appreciation of such spiritual truth; he has centred his aspirations in an earthly emotion, and he finds Heaven for him the entire and complete fruition of that emotion. THE SPIRITUAL PLANE. 227 What, after all, is reality and what is unreality when we are handling the manifestations of things, and not their essential spiritual realities ? Is the body of the beloved friend the reality ? That will be dust and nothingness in a few years. For ages after its decay, the spiritual counterpart which A’s thought has evoked or created is there before him unchanged and unchange- able. Nor is it a mere unresponsive phantom to be gazed at. The creations of thought on the spiritual plane are alive. It will never be unresponsive to A, for his desire has invested it with the externals of the emotion he would have desired his friend to possess. The world in which he will live—in Heaven—is a subjective world, no doubt; from the point of view of supreme knowledge, a reali of self-centred rapture ; but it will be a condition of things for“*him in which no disappointment is possible. The duration is merely determined by the eventual exhaustion of the force of the desire that has evoked it. If its character change, that will merely be because in the latent consciousness of A there are other aspirations to be fulfilled, capable of displacing the aspiration we have been dealing with or requiring expansion simultaneously with that. There is room, so to speak, in the subjective world of the soul enjoying Heaven, for many affections, for many sources of delight. But though our own demands upon the infinite resources of the spiritual plane may be of an exalted order, let us not on that account require that Heaven shall be constructed, so to speak, to suit our case only, and leave plunged in forlorn unhappi- ness the myriads whose aspirations have not risen 228 THE GROWTH OF THE SOUL. above the simple blessings suggested to the imagina- tion by an unthoughtful experience of the earth life. On first contact with this idea I know that it dis- concerts many vague aspirations which imagination associates with the idea of heavenly experiences, but if the actual provisions of Nature may in this way fail to realise certain expectations, the failure is due, not to the shortcomings of Heaven, so to speak, but to the absolutely unreasonable and impracticable character of commonplace expectations concerning these. It is only on a higher level than that which is touched by the undeveloped majority, that it is possible for the soul to come into contact with those deeper realities of spiritual existence on which a true union of all spiritual individualities becomes possible. While the spiritual growth for any given individual is imperfect, it could not find happiness in a premature emancipa- tion from those limitations in which alone, up to that period, it had found scope for the play of its affections. Devachanic existence may therefore be thought of as partaking to soine extent of the nature of a vision, but the vision is one as vivid—all assurances indeed lead us to believe, more vivid—than that illusion by which we are surrounded on the physical plane of life. From the most exalted point of view, indeed, all states short of that must partake in some measure of illusion, which is thus regarded as more and more completely separat- ing itself from realities, as we carry our observation down through the phases of Nature, until the maxi- mum degree of such separation is reached in the manifestations of life on the physical plane. THE SPIRITUAL PLANE. 229 The difficulty I have touched on here is one which must be thoroughly cleared out of the way before any student of the inner verities of Nature, as related to after-death conditions, can make any serious progress. I grant that at the first blush of the facts, thinking that has been deeply saturated with vague and imprac- ticable conceptions of the future is apt to rebel against true explanations of the Devachanic vision. People for whom all regions of Nature beyond the physical world they see are inaccessible, except in imagination, get into the habit of using even imagination when dealing with ideas of Heaven in a terribly unintelligent way. They lose sight of the whole principle which in connexion with every department of Nature they know anything about, they apply to all questions with so much determination; they ignore the fundamental idea of evolution. They claim that Heaven for all men shall realise all that can be imagined as heavenly by the most advanced representatives of the race; that it shall be an objective locality, where the things seen by one denizen are equally seen by all; the con- ditions enjoyed by one, equally by all. This idea is profoundly immoral in reality; but above all things it is foolish. The ultimate possibilities of evolution undoubtedly provide for all human beings who grow up to them, spiritual destinies immensely transcending the conditions of the Devachanic plane as these present themselves to normal entities of the present period in evolution. I shall attempt to deal with some of these possibilities later on. But long before a human soul has grown to the development in which it will be capable 230 THE GROWTH OF THE SOUL. of consciousness on Nirvanic levels, it is still in need of spiritual refreshment, and desperately in want of some experiences it can feel as happiness, in the course of its weary pilgrimage through the innumer- able incarnations on which it is dependent—under the programme of the whole system—for its upward growth. ‘‘I myself am Heaven and Hell” answers the ‘‘Soul” of the Persian poet, when sent through the Invisible ‘‘that after life to spell.’ The line embodies a deeper truth than is suspected by many who quote it with an approval they are quick to with- draw from the same idea set forth with scientific pre- cision. The soul makes its own Heaven by evoking from the infinitely responsive conditions of Nature by which it is confronted on the Devachanic plane, the vision which exactly provides for its happiness. And in furnishing it with the necessary facilities for doing this, Nature does not find it necessary to make a sacri- fice of other souls whose happiness might not be entirely provided for if they were called upon to play exactly the parts assigned to them in the visions of all their friends. Nor would it always be possible, however they might be sacrificed, that they should, in this way, play what might easily be incompatible parts. In short, any Heaven that was constructed to meet the objections of persons who find fault with the aspect of the Devachanic plane which renders it, for our present humanity, the heaven of inter-incarnate periods, —would soon be reduced to a melancholy scene of conflicting jealousies and despair. Iilusive in one sense the Devachanic vision may THE SPIRITUAI, PLANE.