would see all Egos as its brother-Souls, and looking back over its past would recognise all the varied relationships it had borne to others in many lives, as the actor would remember the many parts he had played with other actors, and would think of each brother actor as a man, and not in the parts he had played as his father, his son, his judge, his murderer, his master, his friend.  The deeper human relationship would prevent the brother actors from identifying each other with their parts, and so the perfected spiritual Egos, recognising their deep unity and full brotherhood, would no longer be deluded by the trappings of earthly relationships.  But the Devachani, at least in the lower stages, is still within the personal boundaries of his past earth-life; he is shut into the relationships of the one incarnation; his paradise is peopled with those he “loved best with an undying love, that holy feeling that alone survives,” and thus the purified personal Ego is the salient feature, as above said, in the Devachani.  Again quoting from the “Notes on Devachan”: 

“Who goes to Devachan?” The personal Ego, of course; but beatified, purified, holy.  Every Ego—­the combination of the sixth and seventh principles[35]—­which after the period of unconscious gestation is reborn into the Devachan, is of necessity as innocent and pure as a new-born babe.  The fact of his being reborn at all shows the preponderance of good over evil in his old personality.  And while the Karma [of Evil] steps aside for the time being to follow him in his future earth re-incarnation, he brings along with him but the Karma of his good deeds, words and thoughts into this Devachan.  “Bad” is a relative term for us—­as you were told more than once before—­and the Law of Retribution is the only law that never errs.  Hence all those who have not slipped down into the mire of unredeemable sin and bestiality go to the Devachan.  They will have to pay for their sins, voluntary and involuntary, later on.  Meanwhile they are rewarded; receive the effects of the causes produced by them.

Now in some people a sense of repulsion arises at the idea that the ties they form on earth in one life are not to be permanent in eternity.  But let us look at the question calmly for a moment.  When a mother first clasps her baby-son in her arms, that one relationship seems perfect, and if the child should die, her longing would be to re-possess him as her babe; but as he lives on through youth to manhood the tie changes, and the protective love of the mother and the clinging obedience of the child merge into a different love of friends and comrades, richer than ordinary friendship from the old recollections; yet later, when the mother is aged and the son in the prime of middle life, their positions are reversed and the son protects while the mother depends on him for guidance.  Would the relation have been more perfect had it ceased in infancy with only the one