INHABITANTS
HAVING
sketched in, however slightly,
the background of our picture, we must now attempt to fill in the
figures— to describe the
inhabitants of the astral plane. The immense variety of these beings makes it
exceedingly difficult to arrange and tabulate them. Perhaps the most
convenient method will be to divide them into three great classes, the
human, the non-human, and the artificial.
I. HUMAN.
The human denizens of the astral
plane fall naturally into two groups, the living and the dead, or, to
speak more accurately, those who have still a physical body, and those
who have not.
1. LIVING
The men who manifest themselves on
the astral plane during
physical life may be subdivided into four classes:—
1. The Adept and his
Pupils. Those belonging to
this class usually employ as a vehicle not the astral body at all, but
the mind-body, which is composed of the matter of the four lower or rupa
levels of the plane next above. The advantage of this vehicle is that it
permits of instant passage
from the mental plane to the astral and back, and allows of the use at all times of the
greater power and keener sense of its own plane.
The mind-body is not naturally
visible to astral sight at all, and consequently the pupil who works in
it learns to gather round
himself a temporary veil of astral matter when in the course of his work he wishes
to become perceptible to the inhabitants of the lower plane in order to
help them more efficiently.
This temporary body is usually formed for the pupil by his Master on the first
occasion, and he is then
instructed and assisted until he can form it for himself easily and
expeditiously. Such a vehicle, though an exact reproduction of the man
in appearance, contains none of the matter of his own astral body, but
corresponds to it in the same
way as a materialization corresponds to a physical body.
At an earlier stage of his
development the pupil may be found functioning in the astral body like
any one else; but whichever vehicle he is employing, the man who is
introduced to the astral plane under the guidance of a competent teacher
has always the fullest possible consciousness there, and is able to
function perfectly easily upon
all its subdivisions. He is in fact himself, exactly as his friends know
him on earth, minus only the four lower principles in the one case and
the three lower in the other, and plus the additional powers and
faculties of this higher condition, which enable him to carry on far
more easily and far more efficiently on that plane during sleep the
Theosophical work which occupies so much of his thought in his waking
hours. Whether he will remember fully and accurately on the physical
plane what he has done or learnt on the other depends largely upon
whether he is able to carry his consciousness without intermission from
the one state to the other.
The investigator will occasionally
meet on the astral plane students of occultism from all
parts of the world (belonging
to lodges quite unconnected with the Masters of whom Theosophists know
most) who are in many cases most earnest and self-sacrificing seekers
after truth. It is noteworthy, however, that all such lodges are at
least aware of the existence of the great Himalayan Brotherhood, and acknowledge it
as containing among its members the highest Adepts now known on earth.
2. The Psychically-developed
Person who is not under the guidance of a Master. Such a person may or may not be
spiritually developed, for
the two forms of advancement do not necessarily go together. When a
man is born with psychic powers it is simply the result of efforts made
during a previous incarnation, which may have been of the noblest and
most unselfish character, or on the other hand may have been ignorant
and ill-directed or even entirely unworthy.
Such an one will usually be perfectly
conscious when out of the body, but for want of proper training is
liable to be greatly deceived as to what he sees. He will often be able
to range through the different subdivisions of the astral plane almost
as fully as persons belonging to the last class; but sometimes he is
especially attracted to some one division and rarely travels beyond its
influences. His recollection of what he has seen may vary according to
the degree of his development through all the stages from perfect
clearness to utter distortion or blank oblivion. He will appear always
in this astral body, since he does not know how to function in the
mental vehicle.
3. The Ordinary Person—that is, the person without any psychic development—who floats about in
his astral body during sleep in a more or less unconscious condition. In deep slumber the higher principles in
their astral vehicle almost invariably withdraw from the body, and hover
in its immediate neighbourhood, though in quite undeveloped persons they
are practically almost as much asleep as the body is.
In some cases, however, this astral
vehicle is less lethargic, and floats dreamily about on the various
astral currents, occasionally recognizing other people in a similar
condition, and meeting with experiences of all sorts, pleasant and
unpleasant, the memory of which, hopelessly confused and often
travestied into a grotesque caricature of what really happened, will
cause the man to think next morning what a remarkable dream he has had.
All cultured people, belonging to the
higher races of the world, have at the present time their astral senses
very fairly developed, so that, if they were sufficiently aroused to
examine the realities which surround them during sleep, they would be
able to observe them and learn much from them. But, in the vast majority
of cases, they are not so aroused, and they spend most of their nights
in a kind of brown study, pondering deeply over whatever thought may
have been uppermost in their minds when they fell asleep. They have the
astral faculties, but they scarcely use them; they are certainly awake
on the astral plane, and yet they are not in the least awake to the
plane, and are consequently conscious of their surroundings only very
vaguely, if at all.
When such a man becomes a pupil of
one of the Masters of Wisdom, he is usually at once shaken out of this somnolent condition, fully awakened
to the realities around him on
that plane, and set to learn from them and to work among them, so that
his hours of sleep are no longer a blank, but are filled with active and
useful occupation, without in the least interfering with
the healthy, repose of the tired physical body. (See
Invisible Helpers.
Chap. v.)
These extruded astral bodies are
almost shapeless and very indefinite in outline in the ease of the more
backward races and individuals, but as the man developes in intellect
and spirituality his floating astral becomes better defined, and more
closely resembles his physical encasement. It is often asked how—since
the undeveloped astral is so vague in outline, and since the great
majority of mankind come under the head of the undeveloped—how it is
ever possible to recognise
the ordinary man at all when he is in his astral body. In trying to answer that
question we must endeavour to realize that, to the clairvoyant eye, the
physical body of man appears surrounded by what we call the aura—a
luminous coloured mist, roughly ovoid in shape, and extending to a
distance of some eighteen inches from the body in all directions. All
students are aware that this aura is exceedingly complex, and contains
matter of all the different planes on which man is at present provided
with vehicles; but for the moment let us think of it as it would appear
to one who possessed no higher power of vision than the astral.
For such a spectator the aura would
of course contain only astral matter, and would therefore be a simpler
object of study. He would see,
however, that this astral matter not only surrounded the physical body,
but interpenetrated it, and that within the periphery of that body it
was much more densely
aggregated than in that part of the aura which lay outside it. Possibly this may be due to the attraction of the large
amount of dense a astral matter which is gathered together there as the counterpart of
the cells of the physical
body, but however that may he, the fact is undoubted that the matter of the astral body which
lies within the limits of the
physical is many times denser than that outside it.
When during sleep the astral body is
withdrawn from the physical this arrangement still persists, and any one
looking at such an astral body with clairvoyant vision would still see,
just as before, a form resembling the physical body surrounded by an
aura. That form would now be composed only of astral matter, but still
the difference in density between it and its surrounding mist would be quite sufficient to make it
clearly distinguishable, even
though it is itself only a form of denser mist.
Now as to the difference in
appearance between the evolved and the unevolved man. Even in the case
of the latter the features and shape of the inner form would be
recognizable always, though blurred and indistinct, but the surrounding
egg would scarcely deserve the name, for it would be in fact a mere
shapeless wreath of mist, having neither regularity nor permanence of
outline.
In the more developed man the change
would be very marked, both in the aura and the form within it. This
latter would be far more distinct and definite—a closer reproduction of
the man's physical appearance; while instead of the floating mist-wreath
we should see a sharply defined ovoid form, preserving its shape
unaffected amidst all the varied currents which are always swirling
around it on the astral plane.
Since the psychical faculties of
mankind are in course of
evolution, and individuals are at all stages of their development, this
class naturally melts by imperceptible gradations into the former one.
4. The Black Magician or his pupil. This class corresponds somewhat to the first, except that the
development has been for evil instead
of good, and the powers acquired are used for purely selfish purposes
instead of for the benefit of humanity. Among its lower ranks come members
of the negro race who practise the ghastly rites of the Obeah or Voodoo
schools, and the medicine-men of many a savage tribe; while higher in
intellect, and therefore the more blameworthy, stand the Tibetan black magicians, who are often,
though incorrectly, called by Europeans Dugpas—a title properly belonging, as is quite
correctly explained by Surgeon-Major Waddell in his book on The Buddhism of Tibet,
only to the Bhotanese
subdivision of the great Kargyu sect, which is part of what may be called
the semi-reformed school of Tibetan Buddhism.
The Dugpas no doubt deal in Tantrik
magic to a considerable extent, but the real red-hatted entirely
unreformed sect is that of the Nin-ma-pa, though far beyond them still
lower depth be the Bonpa—the votaries of the aboriginal religion, who have
never accepted any form of Buddhism at all. It must not, however, He
supposed that all Tibetan sects except the Gelugpa are necessarily and
altogether evil; a truer view would be that as the rules of other sects permit
considerably greater laxity of
life and practice, the proportion of self-seekers among them is likely to
be much larger than among the stricter reformers. |
