Theosophy and Occultism
GA 90c — 25 September 1903, Berlin
VI. The Symbol of the Bee, Evolution on Earth, Kamaloka – Devachan, Immortality
Last time I spoke of the moment when the supermundane being of man unites with what we call the “earthly body”. This union was possible because of the coming together of two entities, an astral entity and a physical one. Together they are then subject to physical laws. Let us take the example of the house. The condition of the house does not depend on the occupant. The condition of the house may depend on the temperature, the weather and so on.
I should have to tell you about [seven] world secrets. Especially one that deals with birth and death. It is a sin to express these secrets in words. Therefore, I can only speak of them to a certain extent.
You will hear more in the fall. Then there are still some things that I want to formulate as follows: whether or not I will become aware of some secrets after death, whether or not, when our physical shell has fallen, I will receive a sum of knowledge that remains hidden to us in the physical shell. Theosophists have been reproached for treating these things as if they wanted to lead them away from the sensual and towards the supernatural, as if they were trying to distract people from the immediate, active work, as if they wanted to distract people from the physical people among whom they live. But that is not right. Because only if you take things too simply can you come to this conclusion. We must not believe that in the intermediate state man has a wealth of knowledge that he did not possess before. From embodiment to embodiment, the being progresses in development. Such progressive development of the human being was in primeval times and will also be in primeval times. But it was something different in primeval times and will be something different again in future times. It used to be something that needed to pass through the work in the cosmic worlds.
We know that the people who live here now have lived on this or another planet in previous lives. During all these passages, the inner core of the human being absorbs something. Later, when he has passed through, he has more than he had before.
To clarify this, let us take the example of learning to write. We have now forgotten the difficulties of learning. But the ability to write has remained with us. We would not have this ability if we had not gone through the effort of learning. This is how it is in the world of man, and it is the same in the cosmic world. It is the same during each incarnation. Man is in a continuous learning process. A thousand tasks and a thousand experiences are to be mastered. What remains of the laborious learning process is the result – a basic power.
That is why there was and is a symbol in all mysteries. This symbol was shown to the mystics in its full meaning when the mystic had progressed a little. He was compared to the bees. The bee is the symbol of man in general. If you understand this correctly, you will also understand immortality. The bee flies from flower to flower and carries what it needs into the hive. But honey is what gives the beehive its meaning. Man is also a bee that moves down from the spiritual world - the beehive - to the various other worlds and brings the honey from them, in order to then bring it back to the realm of the spirit, which is the home of the soul. Without what the soul has collected outside, the result of the collecting would never be in the realm of the spirit. So man is also obliged to bring the honey he has collected. If he does not gain experience, he would be like a bee that only sits on the flowers without sucking their honey.
Thus, Theosophy does not call upon people to be ignorant of the world or even to turn away from the world, but rather to grow together and work together with the physical world. A mature person from this sensual world would not forget the temporal in the eternal and the eternal in the temporal. Each in its place.
We incarnate, we then live within the embodiments. But we want to remain the beings that we are. That is why we should bring the results up into the world of the spirit! The idea of immortality in Theosophy is an idea that urges us to absorb as much as possible into ourselves. If our being did not live in a body in which it can hear, see, and touch, it could never perform works that are to be performed in the external sensual world. We need the senses to connect with the things of our earth in this way. The experiences we need can only be drawn from physical existence through our senses. I have already mentioned the relevant Greek expressions: nous aisthetikon, lower spiritual power, and nous poetikos, higher spiritual power.
Today we are incarnated. We should do as much as we can according to our abilities, so that when we incarnate again, we can do more and more for this earth. Everything that falls between two incarnations also serves his earthly development, as does what he does in this incarnation itself. We are placed in a heavenly existence in the intermediate states between two incarnations so that we can learn to fulfill our earthly existence better and better. This is based on what you can often find in theosophical books. It is often said there that nothing new occurs between two incarnations, but that only a processing occurs. We are here only created for our earthly existence.
Our ancestors, however, had very different forms from us, and our descendants will again have very different forms from those we have now. What we call physique, the physical body, did not yet exist in the lunar epoch. It will not exist in the epoch that will follow ours either. What we call the mineral kingdom was not there before the earth and will not be there after the earth either. We must therefore also be clear about the fact that what we call “mind” is only of importance within our earthly development. Our human, personal intellect is something that adheres to this earth, just as our physical body adheres to the earth. Only within such a physical structure as the earth possesses does such an intellect have any meaning. Our intellect corresponds to sensual things. It is the right instrument for these sensual things.
The whole form as you have it now is not there when your bodily senses cease and you discard the physical body. Many say that everything around them is nothing but an illusion. We form our ideas about what we have here in our senses. It may also be said that everything that is not sensual reality is not reality, that it is an illusion, that it is also an illusion to call the higher kind of reality, such as “Kamaloka” and “Devachan”, also “reality”.
By teaching this higher reality, Theosophy not only helps people to understand a reality after death. We live with the physical things on our earth. Our existence is linked to these things. First through feeling, then through knowledge, through thinking. We also feel pleasure and pain. Our soul works on things, forms ideas and concepts in the world. And in these ideas and concepts, the human being lives. If you were only pushed by things and had no memory and would forget it if you had seen a dog, every other dog would be a new object for you. Without memory, you would not be able to bridge the gap between individual experiences. So we stand in the world as feeling and thinking human beings.
We connect what evokes satisfying feelings in us to a unity, to the good, and also to everything that evokes unsatisfying feelings in us, to the bad. When we no longer have the world in sensual impressions, our sympathies and antipathies still remain. You cannot learn anything about the earthly world except when you are in the physical shell with the sensory organs.
But what develops from these sensations, the feelings and the thoughts, they are what remain. The human being then has to suck that out of the physical. Master K[oot] H[oomi] told us that a person can become immortal if he only wants to. He did not say that he is immortal under all circumstances, but that he can achieve immortality. Man does this by sucking the honey out of the world and taking it with him into the spiritual worlds.
However, we cannot fully develop what we have experienced in one incarnation. We are constantly prevented from fully developing this free power of our soul. In fact, the feeling that connects with any object of the sensory world is something much greater, much more powerful than can actually be perceived in the sensual world. The vehicle for these feelings is the astral body. However, they do not come out in their full power. For the clairvoyant, every thought is a star that sends out its rays in all directions. Within this physical world, however, this star comes into existence in a crippled state. Feelings should also develop in all directions, but they are held together by the physical shell, like a plant in a crevice of a rock.
After the physical shell has fallen away, the person then lives in the astral world, in Kamaloka. A balance must be created there between feelings that are good and those that are bad. That is the task of development. Only good feelings can advance the world, pass them on. The bad ones must be balanced in Kamaloka. Nothing new occurs there. Higher feelings are those which Plato calls “enthusiasm”. They pass over into the higher world. The lower feelings remain in Kamaloka.
Before we have been initiated into the mysteries, we cannot form any ideas about the world of feelings. What we have sown here comes to fruition in the astral world. We receive the fruit of it in the astral world. All desires that have been developed, everything of this kind that is present, becomes visible to us on the astral plane.
The myth of Tantalus, who suffers eternal hunger and thirst although food is placed before him, can teach us a lesson. The water and food disappear as soon as he reaches for them. This is the intensification and correction that occurs on the astral plane. You can find this description of the astral world everywhere in the myths of the nations. In Devachan, the harvest of what man has sown on earth takes place. In Devachan, man becomes a regular star. We then return to the new life with appropriate moral principles.
Now a few words about the connection between devachan and our present-day sensual world. In other words, we may ask: Can we look down from devachan on the souls that are embodied here? The souls look somewhat different. Only that which has already penetrated to the devachanic existence from within this physical existence can be perceived by us in the devachan. As an example of this: a mother with two children. The mother dies. The devachan world is active in all three, but it is not a real experience for all of them. There is more devachanic substance in the one who is more developed. Communication between a living person and one in devachan is possible. But it depends on us how much of the devachan can be perceived by us. Instruction regarding the higher worlds is given only in devachan. A person can rise to a master. However, nothing new can be learned in the interim between two incarnations.