tie, or is it not the richer and the sweeter from the
different strands of which the tie is woven?
And so with Egos; in many lives they may hold to each
other many relationships, and finally, standing as
Brothers of the Lodge closely knit together, may look
back over past lives and see themselves in earth-life
related in the many ways possible to human beings,
till the cord is woven of every strand of love and
duty; would not the final unity be the richer not the
poorer for the many-stranded tie? “Finally”,
I say; but the word is only of this cycle, for what
lies beyond, of wider life and less separateness,
no mind of man may know. To me it seems that this
very variety of experiences makes the tie stronger,
not weaker, and that it is a rather thin and poor
thing to know oneself and another in only one little
aspect of many-sided humanity for endless ages of years;
a thousand or so years of one person in one character
would, to me, be ample, and I should prefer to know
him or her in some new aspect of his nature.
But those who object to this view need not feel distressed,
for they will enjoy the presence of their beloved in
the one personal aspect held by him or her in the
one incarnation they are conscious of
for as long
as the desire for that presence remains.
Only let them not desire to impose their own form of
bliss on everybody else, nor insist that the kind
of happiness which seems to them at this stage the
only one desirable and satisfying, must be stereotyped
to all eternity, through all the millions of years
that lie before us. Nature gives to each in Devachan
the satisfaction of all pure desires, and Manas there
exercises that faculty of his innate divinity, that
he “never wills in vain”. Will not
this suffice?
But leaving aside disputes as to what may be to us
“happiness” in a future separated from
our present by millions of years, so that we are no
more fitted now to formulate its conditions than is
a child, playing with its dolls, to formulate the
deeper joys and interests of its maturity, let us
understand that, according to the teachings of the
Esoteric Philosophy, the Devachani is surrounded by
all he loved on earth, with pure affection, and the
union being on the plane of the Ego, not on the physical
plane, it is free from all the sufferings which would
be inevitable were the Devachani present in consciousness
on the physical plane with all its illusory and transitory
joys and sorrows. It is surrounded by its beloved
in the higher consciousness, but is not agonised by
the knowledge of what they are suffering in the lower
consciousness, held in the bonds of the flesh.
According to the orthodox Christian view, Death is
a separation, and the “spirits of the dead”
wait for reunion until those they love also pass through
Death’s gateway, or—according to some—until
after the judgment-day is over. As against this
the Esoteric Philosophy teaches that Death cannot
touch the higher consciousness of man, and that it