Spiritual Growth in the Next World

W. G.'s Experiences

I will now deal with another narrative of a very different order from the last, writes author A. P. Sinnett. In this case I have not been able to get quite so much detail as G. R., from his present advanced point of view, was enabled to furnish. The person whose experiences I have to relate (let me here call him W. G.) was not at a stage of spiritual growth rendering possible, quite as yet, for him such definite occult advancement as that ultimately reached by G. R. But, on the other hand, he was a man of remarkably beautiful nature. He was an intimate friend of mine down here, and I do not think I have ever known, in this life, a man so utterly free as he was from any moral blemish. He was certainly one of the most unselfish men I ever knew, amiable, simple, and modest to an unusual degree, and of a warmly affectionate nature. He died at an advanced age; about seventy-seven, I think. His wife, to whom he was devotedly attached, was with him at the last.

Two or three years had elapsed since his passing when I had the opportunity of getting into touch with him. I ought to explain that he had been in life cordially appreciative of theosophical teaching, though he would never claim to be a student, as his modesty of character made him rather inclined to underrate his intellectual qualifications — not perhaps absolutely of a first-rate order, but in no way defective. He was content to drift quietly through life doing his duty, whatever that might be, and more than doing it when circumstances gave him the opportunity of doing kindness to other people. The notes I have of my conversations with him in reference to his after-death experiences do not enable me to give the story actually in the first person, but, far from being embellished as I shall present it, it must loose a good deal in condensation.

He remembered his deathbed quite well. He had long been ill, and faded away at the end in utter weakness rather than in pain. He tells me he lay there very happy, feeling borne up by the "rosy clouds" of his wife's love, and . . . fell asleep. He woke, he does not know after what interval. It seemed to him at once; but of course we know that in all such cases as this there is a period of unconscious rest on the astral plane before the person passing on really awakes. The interval varies within very wide limits, and may be estimated sometimes in hours of our time, sometimes in months.

My friend woke finding himself lying on a couch in a beautiful room. He saw his father and mother (who of course had passed over a great many years previously) and others of his people standing round. Bringing over from his last stage of consciousness the feeling that he was weak, he made an effort to get up, and found that he was weak no longer. He got up and greeted his people, and asked where was his wife? "Then, you know," he told me, "the door opened and she came in;" [I have already said that his wife survived him, and of course the explanation of her appearance was that higher powers interested in his happiness arranged the moment of his waking to correspond with a period when his wife, on this plane, was asleep, so that in the astral body she could visit her husband]. "All of a sudden she disappeared; but I have seen her frequently since, and am very happy." He himself, he explained, was constantly "in her surroundings" on the physical plane, and sent her through me ardent messages of affection. It was a beautiful house, he told me, in which he was living, in company with many "very nice people," but not people whom he had known in life down here. [This condition illustrates a well-known fact connected with astral life on the higher levels, where people are drawn together by natural sympathies, not, as with us down below, by karmic ties that may not always represent harmonious relations]. The house, he told me, was a very fine place, "smothered in pictures." But these puzzled him greatly, for as he looked at them the figures represented seemed living, moving about, and yet when he touched them they were the same as the surface of the wall. "I can't understand it," he said, using a phrase he had often, in his intellectual modesty, repeated in physical life. I asked if he had not seen any people he knew in life. "Oh, yes! I was out walking one time, or at least it was not walking exactly but I was gliding along somehow in a delicious way looking at things, all very interesting, when I saw someone coming that I thought I knew, and it was . . ." — mentioning the name of one we both knew in life who has passed on to very high levels of spiritual exaltation. "She had come down to pay me a visit, and I have also been honoured by a visit from the Master."

At the time of this conversation my friend was simply revelling in the first exhilarating sensation of happiness which was the natural background of his new life, well up on the fourth sub-level of the astral plane. Even on that level there are many varieties of condition, and I take it that he for many reasons was in the enjoyment of some among the best. At a later date, about a year later, I had another conversation with him, and found that he was partly on the fifth sub-level, surrounded with books and "studying theosophy." He mentioned a well-known man of science whose acquaintance he had made there. He frequently came down on to the fourth sub-plane to visit old friends, and was beginning, I gathered, to be set to work, sharing in that enormous volume of work undertaken by all who are qualified, and not preoccupied by work of a still higher order — the task of soothing and encouraging people who come over from this life in complete ignorance of all that appertains to the real truth of things, and are at first frightened and bewildered even if they are not required by circumstances to endure actual suffering.