Note the words:  “From the standpoint of your terrestrial notions,” for they are the key to all the phrases used about Devachan as an “illusion.”  Our gross physical matter is not there; the limitations imposed by it are not there; the mind is in its own realm, where to will is to create, where to think is to see.  And so, when the Master was asked:  “Would it not be better to say that death is nothing but a birth for a new life, or still better, a going back to eternity?” he answered: 

This is how it really is, and I have nothing to say against such a way of putting it.  Only with our accepted views of material life the words “live” and “exist” are not applicable to the purely subjective condition after death; and were they employed in our Philosophy without a rigid definition of their meanings, the Vedantins would soon arrive at the ideas which are common in our times among the American Spiritualists, who preach about spirits marrying among themselves and with mortals.  As amongst the true, not nominal, Christians so amongst the Vedantins—­the life on the other side of the grave is the land where there are no tears, no sighs, where there is neither marrying nor giving in marriage, and where the just realise their full perfection.

The dread of materialising mental and spiritual conceptions has always been very strong among the Philosophers and oral Teachers of the far East.  Their constant effort has been to free the Thinker as far as possible from the bonds of matter even while he is embodied, to open the cage for the Divine Swallow, even though he must return to it for awhile.  They are ever seeking “to spiritualise the material”, while in the West the continual tendency has been “to materialise the spiritual”.  So the Indian describes the life of the freed Soul in all the terms that make it least material—­illusion, dream, and so on—­whereas the Hebrew endeavours to delineate it in terms descriptive of the material luxury and splendour of earth—­marriage feast, streets of gold, thrones and crowns of solid metal and precious stones; the Western has followed the materialising conceptions of the Hebrew, and pictures a heaven which is merely a double of earth with earth’s sorrows extracted, until we reach the grossest of all, the modern Summerland, with its “spirit-husbands”, “spirit-wives”, and “spirit-infants” that go to school and college, and grow up into spirit-adults.

In “Notes on Devachan",[29] someone who evidently writes with knowledge remarks of the Devachani: 

The a priori ideas of space and time do not control his perceptions; for he absolutely creates and annihilates them at the same time.  Physical existence has its cumulative intensity from infancy to prime, and its diminishing energy from dotage to death; so the dream-life of Devachan is lived correspondentially.  Nature cheats no more the Devachani than she does the living physical man.  Nature provides for him