If men and woman could realize what is going to happen to them after death, it would awaken a certain sense of a needed renewable behavior of a responsible kind. Let us try to restore to mankind the teaching of the ancient wisdom: "as you live so will you be after you die." It is a simple teaching and it is so logical, it brings massive appeal. So let us try to restore to mankind the wisdom of the ancients, it is a simple teaching and it is so logical, it brings with it great appeal: "it goes, as you live so will you be after you die."
If you want to understand what happens to you after death you must just study your self now, and you will know what you are going to get. You are going to get a continuation of precisely what now you are. If a man indulges in vice, what is going to happen to him? He reaps the consequences of his evildoing. He learns by it the lessons that come out of his suffering. If a man fills his mind with gross thoughts and evil dreams, he learns by it in the long run through suffering, for the effects and consequences on his mind and character will ensue. He suffers, he is in torture, he pays the penalty, he has poisoned his inner system and he won't have peace until the poison has worked itself out, until he has become what is called re-formed, or re-shaped. Then he will have peace again; he will be able to sleep in peace again.
Your dreams are from your own mind, and therefore are apart of your own consciousness. A man during his waking hours has evil dreams, evil thoughts; when he sleeps he has nightmares. He learns by them when he sleeps; he certainly is not going to have a heaven of dreams because he has filled his mind with horrid, hateful, mean, degrading thoughts. He has not yet built the substances of heaven.
There is an important spiritual component throughout the universe that is being over looked. It is a state of consciousness which man encounters after death because man himself has made during his life time to have that kind of consciousness. It is called: "kama-loka;" and there is a coordinate state called: "devachan." Kama loka and devachan are attached via the universe, and are the overseers of directing the value of the contact of man's actions, either for the suffering they bring or their peace full dreams. It works itself out, and then a man rises or sinks into whatever is his destiny: a weak devachan, or no devachan at all, according to the individual. In other words if he has made of himself a character which is X, he will have that character, what ever it is, after death. He won't have character Y, or Z or A, or B. Contrariwise, a man who during life has kept himself in hand, has controlled himself, has lived manly, experienced the same law precisely: then after the death state will be unconscious in the kara-loka, or very nearly so, because evil has no kama-loka biases in himself; probably there will a blissful devachan.
Suppose a man has no marked character at all, is neither particularly good nor particularly bad. What kind of after-death states is he going to have? He will have a colorless kama-loka nothing particularly bad; and he will have a colorless devachan, nothing particularly bad. What kind of after death states is he going to have? He will have a colorless kama-loka, nothing particularly bad; and he will have a colorless devachan nothing particularly beautiful or blissful. It will be like a sort of vague, intangible dream. It doesn't amount to much, and consequently he won't amount to mush, after he dies.
Or take the case of a young man of evil ways who reforms, let us say, at about middle age, and spends the rest of his life in deeds, of virtue, of self-improvement. What will his fate in the worlds to come? As stated, the kama-loka and the devachan are simply a continuation of what the man is when he dies. So consequently an evil young man becoming a good old man has practically no kama-loka of an unpleasant kind at all. He will have to pay to the uttermost farthing for any evil he did as a youth---but in his future life; his evil deeds are only thought-deposits. But as he reformed at about middle age, and lived a clean decent life thereafter, his kama-loka will be very slight because it will be simply a continuation of what he was when he died, and the devachan will be in accordance likewise. And here is another very important deduction we should draw from this fact; if we have kama-loka while embodied men and women, we shall have it after death; and precisely according to the same law, because we have spiritual yearlings, dreams of a spiritual type or character while embodied, we shall have the devachan after death. To repeat, the kama-loka is a prorogated or continuation, until it is worked out, of what you have been through in your life. If you set your thought and mind and heart on things which bring you pain, which make you suffer because you are selfish, and stiff-necked in pride and egoism, you will assuredly continue the same bending of consciousness after death. It cannot be otherwise. It is simply you. Therefore, the devachan and the kama-loka are prolongations or continuations of the same states of consciousness respectively that you have gone through on earth, with this difference: that being out of body, which is at once a blind and a shield of protection, you are, as it were-thought, naked thought. And if your thought has been during life on things of horror, or if you have allowed your thought to bend in those directions while embodied you won't be washed free of stain merely because you have cast off the body. Your thought, which is yourself, will continue and you will have to pass through kama-loka and exhaust that phase of thought. It will have to die out as a fire will burn itself out.
Similarly, indeed exactly: if in life you have had beautiful, grand thoughts, you will assuredly have the same in the devachan, but a thousand fold stronger because no longer smothered by the body you have cast off.
So if you want to know what your destiny will be after death, just study you self now and take waning. There is a very important and pertinent lesson that we can learn from this fact, just in that. You can make your postmortem condition what you will it to be now, before it is to late. Nothing in the universe can prevent the bliss of devachan coming to you, or rather your making it for yourself.
There you have the teaching of kama-loka. There you have the teaching of devachan. It is very simple. All the intricate, abstract questions arise largely in failing to understand the elementary principles of the teaching. When you lien down you dream, or you are unconscious. When you die you dream, you are unconscious. You have, when you lie down at night, evil dreams or good dreams, or you are unconscious. When you die you will have evil dreams or beautiful dreams or you will be unconscious--all depending upon the individual and the life you have had. So the kama-loka and the devachan, and indeed the avich, are not things that are going suddenly to happen to you; but because your consciousness has been that way while embodied, they, one or the other , will continue after you die.
You see now the importance of ethics, and why all great sages, seers through out time have tried to teach men to spiritualize and refine their thoughts, to live in the heart-life, to cast out the things which are wrong and evil. The devachan is not waiting for you; the kama-loka is not waiting for you---I mean as absolute conditions now separate from you. If you had them in life, you will have them you will have them after death. The man who has had no thought of hatred or horror or detestation or venom toward another, in other words whose heart and mind have never been nests of evil, will have neither an avichi in life nor after death, nor an unhappy kama-loka in life or after death. He will have an exquisite devachan, and will come back refreshed and vigorous and strong and renewed to begin a new life with everything to begin a new life and with everything in his favor.
After death you continue to be precisely what you are when you die. There is the whole thing. There is the secret of the kama--loka and the devachan and of all the intermediate states of bardo, as the Tibetans call it. All the rest is detail, and that is why I keep emphasizing in my public lectures and in my writings that death is but a sleep. Death is a perfect sleep and sleep an imperfect death. It is literally so. When you sleep you are partly dead. When you die, you are absolutely asleep. If you grasp these simple ideas you will have the whole teaching on your thumbnail, a thumbnail picture. Now another point: I have heard people say that they don't want to remain in devachan, it is a was of time. This is a misunderstanding. You might as well say, I don't want to have sleep tonight, it is a waste of time. As a matter of fact, you need the rest, recuperation, assimilation of the experiences of the past. You are strengthened by it, you grow by it. So by building, for reoccupation, for assimilation, for inner digestion, for strengthening, an is just as mush needed as a night's rest is for the body.
There will come time in human evolution when even the devachan is no longer required, because the man has learned to live in the higher part of his being. Devachan, however beautiful, is an illusion. The time will come in the future when men will no longer have to sleep at night; they won't require it. They will have different kinds of bodies and thus learn to do without the devachan, and will reincarnate almost immediately in order to help mankind---which is the thing they love most of all---and all other beings. These men are what we call masters, in all their grades. But for us ordinary human beings the devachan is a necessary episode.
The devachan, however, while a beautiful experience of the consciousness, is an experience of the higher personal consciousness, the higher part of us human egos, the higher part of the personal man, its aroma, so to speak. In this fact lies the training bringing about the shortening of devachan. If you learn to live outside of the personality and in the Eternal, while you are embodied, if it becomes habitual with you, your devachan will be correspondingly shortened because you won't want it. You won't need it. The bent of your mind is not in selfish beatific satisfaction of the soul. That is what the devachan is, a fools paradise. When compared with reality, it is an illusion. But because men and women strain for those things and suffer to attain them, the devachan in nature's infinite pity becomes the time when they have it, the resting, relaxing time, the time of recuperation, digestion, assimilation. As we grow, as the ages pass, in future ages we won't long so desperately to have these beatific satisfactions of the soul. We shall find our happiness in impersonal attachments to things of beauty, things which belong to higher spiritual man, and not to hungry human soul.
Rise out of the personality so that you learn to use it as a willing, acquiescent instrument, and live in the spiritual part of you, which means impersonally; live universally so that you are not swayed by your own hunger for the things that please and help and rest you; but live in the spiritual, in the universal, and all these other things will be added unto you.
Thank you G.D.P. One truth, many paths. Be good, do good.
Louis DiVirgilio
