the impression he makes on us.  This is, to our consciousness, our friend, and lacks nothing in objectivity.  A similar image is present to the consciousness of the Devachani, and to him lacks nothing in objectivity.  As the physical plane friend is visible to an observer on earth, so is the mental plane friend visible to an observer on that plane.  The amount of the friend that ensouls the image is dependent on his own evolution, a highly evolved person being capable of far more communication with a Devachani than one who is unevolved.  Communication when the body is sleeping is easier than when it is awake, and many a vivid “dream” of one on the other side of death is a real interview with him in Kamaloka or in Devachan.

Love beyond the grave, illusion though you may call it,[44] has a magic and divine potency that re-acts on the living.  A mother’s Ego, filled with love for the imaginary children it sees near itself, living a life of happiness, as real to it as when on earth—­that love will always be felt by the children in flesh.  It will manifest in their dreams and often in various events—­in providential protections and escapes, for love is a strong shield, and is not limited by space or time.  As with this Devachanic “mother”, so with the rest of human relationships and attachments, save the purely selfish or material.[45]

Remembering that a thought becomes an active entity, capable of working good or evil, we easily see that as embodied Souls can send to those they love helping and protecting forces, so the Devachani, thinking of those dear to him, may send out such helpful and protective thoughts, to act as veritable guardian angels round his beloved on earth.  But this is a very different thing from the “Spirit” of the mother coming back to earth to be the almost helpless spectator of the child’s woes.

The Soul embodied may sometimes escape from its prison of flesh, and come into relations with the Devachani.  H.P.  Blavatsky writes: 

Whenever years after the death of a person his spirit is claimed to have “wandered back to earth” to give advice to those it loved, it is always in a subjective vision, in dream or in trance, and in that case it is the Soul of the living seer that is drawn to the disembodied spirit, and not the latter which wanders back to our spheres.[46]

Where the sensitive, or medium, is of a pure and lofty nature, this rising of the freed Ego to the Devachani is practicable, and naturally gives the impression to the sensitive that the departed Ego has come back to him.  The Devachani is wrapped in its happy “illusion”, and

The Souls, or astral Egos, of pure loving sensitives, labouring under the same delusion, think their loved ones come down to them on earth, while it is their own spirits that are raised towards those in the Devachan.[47]

This attraction can be exercised by the departed Soul from Kamaloka or from Devachan: