The devachanic consciousness is also most lucidly explained by another Master * of Eastern Wisdom. He writes:

"Devachan is not, cannot be, monotonous; for this would be contrary to all analogies and antagonistic to the laws and effects under which results are proportionate to antecedent energies.

"There are two fields of causal manifestations: the objective and the subjective. The grosser energies find their outcome in the new personality of each birth in the cycle of evoluting individuality. The moral and spiritual activities find their sphere of effects in Devachan.

"The dream of Devachan lasts until Karma is satisfied in that direction, until the ripple of force reaches the edge of its cyclic basin and the being moves into the next area of causes.

"That particular one moment which will be most intense and uppermost in the thoughts of the dying brain at the moment of dissolution will regulate all subsequent moments. The moment thus selected becomes the key-note of the whole harmony, around which cluster in endless variety all the aspirations and desires which in connection with that moment had ever crossed the dreamer's brain during his lifetime, without being realized on earth, - the theme modelling itself on, and taking shape from, that group of desires which was most intense during life.

"In Devachan there is no cognizance of time, of which the Devachanee loses all sense.

"(To realize the bliss of Devachan or the woes of Avitchi you have to assimilate them as we do.)

"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 to dotage and death; so the dream-life of Devachan is lived correspondentially. Nature cheats no more the devachanee than she does the living physical man. Nature provides for him far more than real bliss and happiness there than she does here, where all the conditions of evil and chance are against him.

* See Notes on Devachan by "X," in The Path, Vol. V, pp. 40 and 80, et seq.

"To call the Devachan existence a 'dream' in any other sense than that of a conventional term, is to renounce forever the knowledge of the esoteric doctrine, the sole custodian of truth. As in actual earth life, so there is for the Ego in Devachan the first flutter of psychic life, the attainment of prime, the gradual exhaustion of force passing into semi-consciousness and lethargy, total oblivion, and - not death, but birth, birth into another personality, and the resumption of action which daily begets new congeries of causes that must be worked out in another term of Devachan and still another physical birth as a new personality. What the lives in Devachan and upon earth shall be respectively in each instance is determined by Karma, and this weary round of birth must be ever and ever run through until the being reaches the end of the seventh Round, or attains in the interim the wisdom of an Arhat, or that of a Buddha, and thus gets relieved for a round or two, having learned how to burst through the vicious circle and to pass into Para-nirvana.

"A colorless, flavorless personality has a colorless, feeble devachanic state.

"There is a change of occupation, a continual change in Devachan, just as much and far more than there is in the life of any man or woman who happens to follow in his or her whole life one sole occupation, whatever it may be, with this difference, that to the Devachanee this spiritual occupation is always pleasant and fills his life with rapture. Life in Devachan is the function of the aspirations of earth life; not the indefinite prolongation of that 'single instant,' but its infinite developments, the various incidents and events based upon and outflowing from that one 'single moment' or moments. The dreams of the objective become the realities of the subjective existence. Two sympathetic souls will each work out its own devachanic sensations, making the other a sharer in its subjective bliss, yet each is dissociated from the other as regards actual mutual intercourse; for what companionship could there be between subjective entities which are not even as material as that ethereal body - the Mayavi Rupa?

"The stay in Devachan is proportionate to the unexhausted psychic impulse originating in earth life. Those whose attractions were preponderatingly material will sooner be drawn back into rebirth by the force of Tanha. [Tanha - desire for sensuous existence. J. A. A.]

"The reward provided by nature for men who are benevolent in a large, systematic way, and who have not focused their affections on an individual or specialty, is that if pure they pass the quicker for that thro the Kama and Rupa locas into the higher sphere of Tribuvana, since it is one where the formulation of abstract ideas and the consideration of general principles fill the thought of its occupant.

"Certainly, the new Ego, once that it is reborn (in Devachan), retains for a certain time - proportionate to its earth life - a complete recollection of his life on earth, but it can never visit the earth from Devachan except in reincarnation.

"Who goes to Devachan?' The personal Ego, of course; but beatified, purified, holy. Every Ego - the combination of the 6th and 7th Principles - 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 reincarnation, 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.

"Of course, it is a state, so to say, of intense selfishness, during which an Ego reaps the reward of his unselfishness on earth. He is completely engrossed in the bliss of all his personal earthly affections, preferences, and thoughts, and gathers in the fruit of his meritorious actions. No pain, no grief, nor even the shadow of a sorrow, comes to darken the bright horizon of his unalloyed happiness: for it is a state of perpetual 'Maya.* Since the conscious perception of one's personality on Earth is but an evanescent dream, that sense will be equally that of a dream in the Devachan - only a hundred - fold intensified; so much so, indeed, that the happy Ego is unable to see through the veil of evils, sorrows, and woes to which those it loved on earth may be subjected. It lives in that sweet dream with its loved - whether gone before or yet remaining on earth; it has them near itself, as happy, as blissful, and as innocent as the disembodied dreamer himself; and yet, apart from rare visions, the denizens of our gross planet feel it not.