CHAPTER XIX

THE SPIRIT WORLD—AS SEEN AND DESCRIBED BY ONE WHO HAS VISITED IT FREQUENTLY

CHARLES W. LEADBEATER serves a highly valuable purpose as a teacher and illustrator of spiritual philosophy, finding much in common between Spiritualism and Theosophy when both are rightly understood. We have introduced this record of wonderful clairvoyance between chapters devoted to our own statements on these and similar great questions to give to our readers independent testimony which agrees very substantially with the views of the author based on closely similar experiences.

The following truly remarkable statements are taken (slightly condensed) from articles published in Chicago during February, 1906, first in the Tribune, then in the Progressive Thinker. We take particular pleasure in presenting these extracts to our readers because they serve to vividly illustrate the kind of visions of the spirit world which modern seers are frequently beholding.

“In my visions and dreams the bright jasper walls I can see,” sang the poet of “The Home of the Soul.” But C. W. Leadbeater, in full waking consciousness, sees all that eye hath not seen or ear hath heard on earth of the glories of the heaven world. He has seen and known the seventh heaven. And what he has done he says all can do.

It is only our lack of development, affirms Mr. Leadbeater, only the limitation imposed upon us by this robe of flesh, that prevents us from fully realizing that all the glory of the highest heaven is about us here and now, and that influences flowing from that world are ever playing upon us if we only will understand and receive them. "Do not complain and cry," said a great teacher of old, "but open your eyes and see. The light is all about you, if you would only cast the bandage from your eyes and look. It is so wonderful, so beautiful, so far beyond what any man has dreamed of or prayed for, and it is forever and forever."

Mr. Leadbeater, as a trained Occultist, has cultivated his higher senses, his occult faculties, whereby are visible to him the heavenly spiritual regions which are shut out to carnal eyes. These heavenly regions are worlds of subtler substance than the physical world, interpenetrating it, and therefore all about us. Heaven is the world of thought, the mental plane, as Occultists term it, supremely a state of consciousness, the "kingdom of heaven" being "within you." The astral plane is the world of feeling; the physical plane, the familiar earth of the senses, is the world of action. The body of action is the physical body, the body of emotion is the astral body, the body of thought is the mental body. The immortal soul, which lives forever, in the heaven world, communicates with the physical world by means of physical impacts transmitted to the physical brain, thence to the astral, and thence to the mental body. The soul is the immortal thinker and ego.

Scientific Occultism trains the faculties of the higher bodies which enable us to see these heavenly regions lying all about us. It was thus that Mr. Leadbeater learned to journey up through the seven heavens. A radiant sense not only of the welcome absence of all evil and discord but of the insistent, overwhelming presence of universal joy is the first and most striking sensation experienced by him who enters upon the heavenly world, reports the visitor. And it never leaves him so long as he remains there, and the man who has once experienced it in full consciousness will regard the world with widely different eyes forever after.

Let a man imagine himself with these feelings of intense bliss and enormously increased power floating in a sea of living light, surrounded by every conceivable variety of loveliness in color and form—the whole changing with every wave of thought that he sends out from the mind, and being as he presently discovers, only the expression of his thought in the matter of the plane and in its elemental essence. For that matter is of the same order as that of which the mind-body itself is composed, and therefore when that vibration of the particles of the mind-body which we call a thought occurs, it extends itself immediately to this surrounding mental matter and sets up corresponding vibrations in it, while in the elemental essence it images itself with absolute exactitude. Concrete thought naturally takes the shape of its objects, while abstract ideas usually represent themselves by all kinds of perfect and geometrical forms.

If the visitor wishes to observe the plane upon which he finds himself it will be necessary for him carefully to suspend his thought for the time, so that its creations may not influence the readily impressible matter around him and thus alter the entire conditions so far as he is concerned. He begins to realize that all this magnificence is not a mere idle or fortuitous display; he finds that it all has a meaning; a meaning which he himself can understand; and presently he grasps the fact that what he is watching with such ecstasy of delight is simply the glorious color language of the angels—the expression of the thought or the conversation of beings far higher than himself in the scale of evolution.

By experiment and practice he discovers that he also can use this new and beautiful mode of expression, and by this discovery he enters into possession of another great tract of his heritage in this celestial realm—the power to hold converse with and to learn from its loftier inhabitants.

If the visitor wishes to carry his analysis of the plane still further and discover what it would be when entirely undisturbed by the thought or conversation of any of its inhabitants, he can do so by forming round himself a huge shell, through which none of these influences can penetrate, and then, holding his own mind perfectly still, examine the conditions which exist inside his shell. He is now able to perceive another and entirely different series of regular pulsations.

These evidently are universal. They cause no change of color, no assumption of form, but flow with resistless regularity through all the matter of the plane, outward and in again, like the exhalations and inhalations of some great breath beyond our ken.

There are several sets of these, clearly distinguishable from one another by volume, by period of vibration, and by the tone of harmony which they bring, and grander than them all sweeps one great wave which seems the heart-beat of the system, a wave which, welling up from unknown centres on far higher planes, pours out its life through all our world, and then draws back in its tremendous tide to that from which it came. In one long, undulating curve it comes, and the sound of it is like the murmur of the sea; and yet in it and through it all the while there echoes a mighty ringing chant of triumph, the music of the spheres. The man who once has heard that glorious song of nature never quite loses it again; even here on this dreary physical plane of illusion he hears it always as a kind of undertone, keeping ever before his mind the strength and light and splendor of the real life above.

The sense itself by which he is able to cognize all this is not the least of the marvels of this celestial world; no longer does he hear and see and feel by separate and limited organs, as he does down here; instead of these he feels within him a new, strange power, which is not any of them and yet includes them all and much more—a power which enables him the moment any person or thing comes before him not only to see it and feel it and hear it but to know all about it instantly inside and out, its causes, its effects, and its possibilities. He finds that for him to think is to realize; there is never any doubt, hesitation, or delay about this direct action of the higher sense. If he thinks of a place, he is there; if of a friend, that friend is before him. Every thought and feeling of his friend lies open as a book before him. All knowledge is his for the searching—all that does not transcend even this lofty plane; the past of the world is as open to him as the present; the indelible records of the memory of nature are ever at his disposal, and history, whether ancient or modern, unfolds itself before his eyes at will.

Not only can he review at leisure all history with which we are acquainted, correcting, as he examines it, the many errors and misconceptions which have crept into the accounts handed down to us; he also can range at will over the whole story of the world from its beginning, watching the slow development of intellect. Nor is his study confined to the progress of humanity alone; he has before him as in a museum all the strange animal and vegetable forms which occupied the stage in days when the world was young; he can follow all the geological changes which have taken place, and watch the course of the great cataclysms which have altered the face of the earth again and again.

The lowest heaven has for its principal characteristic, affection for family or friends, unselfish but usually somewhat narrow. One of the first persons Mr. Leadbeater encountered in heaven was a mother who had died about twenty years ago and left behind her two sons, to whom she was deeply attached. Naturally they were the most prominent figures in her heaven, and quite naturally, too, she thought of them as she had left them. The love which she thus poured out ceaselessly upon these mental images was thus really acting as a beneficent force showered down upon the grown up men in this physical world.

Along these lines only is conscious communication possible between those still imprisoned in the physical body and those who have passed into this celestial realm. A soul may be shining out gloriously through his image in a friend’s heaven life, and yet in his manifestations through the physical body on earth that friend may be entirely unconscious of all this, and so may suppose himself unable to communicate with his departed friend. But if that soul has evolved consciousness to the point of unification and can therefore use his full powers while still in the physical body, he can then realize even during this dull earthly life that he still stands face to face with his friend as of yore, that death has not removed the man he loved, but only opened his eyes to the grander, wider life which ever lies around us all. In appearance the friend would seem much as he did in earth life, yet somehow strangely glorified. There is a reproduction of the physical body.

The dominant characteristic of the second heaven may be said to be anthropomorphic religious devotion. This phase of devotion which consists essentially in the perpetual adoration of a personal deity must be carefully distinguished from those higher forms which find their expression in performing some definite work for the deity’s sake. Some of the most characteristic examples of this plane are to be found among women, who indeed form a large majority of its inhabitants. A quaint and pretty example of the heaven life of a child, aged seven, showed him occupied in reënacting in the heaven world the religious stories which his Irish nurse had told him down here, and, best of all, he loved to think of himself as playing with the infant Jesus, helping him to make those clay sparrows which the power of the Christ-child is fabled to have brought to life and caused to fly.

The chief characteristic of the third heaven may be defined as devotion, expressing itself in active work. The Christian on this plane, for example, instead of merely adoring his Saviour, would think of himself as going out into the world to work for him. It is especially the plane for the working out of great schemes and designs unrealized on earth—of great organizations inspired by religious devotion and usually having for their purpose some philanthropic object. On this plane the higher type of sincere and devoted missionary activity finds expression.

The fourth heaven is arranged into four main divisions —unselfish pursuit of spiritual knowledge; high philosophic or scientific thought; literary or artistic ability exercised for unselfish purposes, and service for the sake of service. We find here many of those noble and unselfish thinkers who seek insight and knowledge only for the purpose of enlightening and helping their fellows.

Here we find all our greatest musicians; Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Wagner, and many others are still flooding the heaven world with harmony far more glorious even than the grandest which they were able to produce when on earth. It seems as if a great stream of divine music poured into them from higher regions and was specialized by them and made their own to be sent forth through all the planes in a great tide of melody which adds to the bliss of all around.

Those who are functioning in full consciousness in the heaven world will clearly hear and fully appreciate this magnificent outpouring.

Here also was one of earth’s failures—for the tragedies of earth-life leave strange marks even in heavenly places. In the world where all thoughts of loved ones smile upon man as friends he was thinking of writing a great book and for the sake of it had refused to use his literary power in making mere sustenance from paltry hack work; but none would look at his book, and he walked the streets despairing, till sorrow and starvation closed his eyes to earth. He had been lonely all his life—in his youth friendless and shut out from family ties, and in his manhood unable to work only in his own way, pushing aside hands that would have led him to a wider view of life’s possibilities than the earthly paradise he longed to make for all. Now, as he thought and wrote, though there were none whom he had loved as personal or ideal helpers who could make part of this, his mental life, he saw stretching before him the Utopia of which he had dreamed, for which he had tried to live, and the vast thronging impersonal multitudes whom he had longed to serve; and the joy of their joy surged back on him and made his solitude a heaven. When he is born again on earth he surely will return with power to achieve as well as to plan, and this celestial vision will be partially bodied forth in happier terrene lives:

Is it contended that in heaven we make our own surroundings and for that reason see only a part of heaven? Surely down here also the world of which a person is sensible is never the whole of the outer world but only so much of it as his senses, intellect, education, enable him to take in. What does he know as a rule even of the more recondite physical facts which surround him and meet him at every step he takes? The truth is that here as in heaven life he lives in a world which is largely of his own creation. He does not realize it either there or here, but that is only because of his ignorance, because he knows no better.

Is it said that in the heaven world a man takes his thoughts for real things? He is quite right; they are real things and on the thought plane, nothing but thought can be real. There we recognize that great fact; here we do not; on which plane, then, is the delusion the greater? Those thoughts of his are indeed realities, and are capable of producing the most striking results upon living men—results which can never be other than beneficial because upon that high plane there can be none but loving thought. Thus it will be seen that the theory that the heaven life is an illusion is merely the result of a misconception and shows imperfect acquaintance with its conditions and possibilities; the truth is that the higher we rise the nearer we draw to the one reality.

The fifth heaven is the true home of the soul and by far the most populous of all the heavens. Here are present almost all the 60,000,000,000 souls who are said to be engaged in the present human evolution—all, in fact, except the comparatively small number who, by their purity and knowledge, are able to pass into higher heavens. It is the true home of the souls of nearly all mankind, and here lives the soul while the lower mind and body dwell in the coarser physical and astral worlds.

Souls connected with a physical body are distinguishable from those enjoying the disembodied state by a difference in the vibrations set up on the surface of the globes; it is therefore easy on this plane to see at a glance whether an individual is or is not in incarnation at the time. The immense majority, whether in or out of the body, are but dreamily semi-conscious; those who are fully awake are radiant exceptions standing out amid the less brilliant crowds like stars of the first magnitude, and between these and the least developed are ranged every variety of size and beauty of color, each representing the exact stage of evolution at which he has arrived.

Passing from the fifth to the sixth heaven is like going from a great city to a peaceful countryside; for at the present stage of evolution only a small minority of individuals have risen to this loftier level, where even the least advanced is definitely self-conscious and also conscious of his surroundings. The soul on this level is aware of the purpose and method of evolution; he knows that he is engaged in a work of self-development, and recognizes the stages of physical and post-mortem life through which he passes in his lower vehicles. The personality with which he is connected is seen as a part of himself, and he endeavors to guide it, using his knowledge of the past as a storehouse of experience from which he formulates principles of conduct, clear and immutable convictions of right and wrong. These he sends down into his lower mind, superintending and guiding its activities.

The seventh heaven, the most glorious level of the mental world, has but few denizens as yet from our humanity, for on its heights dwell none but “Masters of Compassion and Wisdom ” and their initiated pupils. Of the beauty of form and color and sound no words can speak, for mortal language has no terms in which these radiant splendors may find expression. Enough that they are, and that some of our race are wearing them, the earnest of what others shall be, the fruition of which the seed was sown on lowlier planes.

From this highest heaven come down most of the influences poured out by the Masters of Compassion as they work for the evolution of the human race, acting directly on the souls of men, shedding on them inspiring influences and energies which stimulate spiritual growth, which enlighten the intellect, and purify the emotions. Hence genius receives its illuminations; here all upward efforts find their guidance.

As the sun’s rays fall everywhere from one centre and each body that receives them uses them after its nature, so from the Elder Brothers of the race fall on souls the light and life which it is their function to dispense, and each uses as much as it can assimilate and thereby grows and evolves. Thus, as everywhere else, the highest glory of the heavenly world is found in the glory of service. They who have accomplished their mental evolution are fountains from which flow strength for those who are still climbing.