Saturday 4 January 2020

THE JOURNEY OF THE SOUL --- PART FIVE



 The Master Guru Sri Yukteswar continues....

RECOGNIZING LOVED ONES

An astral person meets a multitude of relatives, fathers, mothers, wives, husbands, children and friends, acquired during different incarnations on Earth, as they appear from time to time in various parts of the astral cosmos. He/she is therefore at a loss to understand whom to love especially; but one learns in this way to give divine and equal love to all beings, as children and individualized expressions of God.

Though the outward appearance of loved ones may have changed (more or less, in conformance with their development of new qualities in the previous life), an astral-world resident employs his or her unerring intuition to recognize all those once dear to them on other planes of existence and welcomes them to their new astral home.

Because each atom in creation is inextinguishably dowered with individuality, an astral friend will be recognized by others no matter what costume he or she may don, even as on Earth an actor´s identity is discovered by close observation, despite any disguise.

AN ASTRAL TIMESPAN

The normal span of life in the astral spheres is much longer than on Earth. A person dwells on an astral planet for a certain period, determined by the weight of their material karma that draws him/her back to the terrestrial realm at a lawfully fixed time. Some beings, after physical death, return to Earth immediately, usually because of their strong desire to do so. The average length of astral embodiment for fairly advanced persons is from five hundred to one thousand years (measured in terms of terrestrial standards of time). A sequoias redwood will outlive other trees by millenniums, or as a number of yogis live for several hundred years though most people die before the age of seventy, so exceptional persons live on an astral sphere for about two thousand years.

The astral being does not have to contend painfully with Death at the time of shedding his/her luminous body. Many of these beings nevertheless feel slightly nervous at the thought of dropping their astral form for the subtler causal one. The astral world is free from unwilling death, disease and old age. These three dreads are the curse of Earth, where mankind has allowed his/her consciousness to identify itself almost wholly with a frail physical body requiring constant aid from air, food and sleep in order to exist at all.

ASTRAL DEATH & PHYSICAL REBIRTH

Physical death is attended by the disappearance of breath and the disintegration of fleshly cells. Astral death consists of the dispersement of lifetrons (Prana), those manifest units of cosmic energy which constitute the bodily life of astral beings. At physical death mankind loses his/her consciousness of flesh and becomes aware of the subtle body in the astral world. Experiencing astral death in due time a person thus passes from the consciousness of astral birth and death to that of physical birth and death. The recurrent cycles of astral and physical encasement are the ineluctable destiny of all unenlightened beings. Scriptural definitions of heaven and hell sometime stir man´s deeper-than-subconscious memories of his lonng series of experiences in the blithesome astral and disappointing terrestrial worlds.

AN INDIVIDUALISED SOUL

Mankind as individualised souls are essentially causal-bodied. That body is a matrix of the thirty-five IDEAS required by God as the basic or causal thought forces from which God later formed the subtle astral body of nineteen elements and the gross physical body of sixteen elements.

The nineteen elements of the astral body are mental, emotional and lifetronic (Prana). the nineteen components are intelligence; ego; feeling; mind (sense-consciousness); five instruments of KNOWLEDGE, the subtle counterparts of the senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch; five instrumets if ACTION, the mental correspondence for the executive abilities to procreate, excrete, talk, walk and exercise manual skill; and five instruments of LIFE FORCE, those empowered to perform the crystallizing, assimilating, eliminating, metabolizing and circulating functions of the body. This subtle astral encasement of nineteen elements survives death of the physical body, which is made of sixteen gross chemical elements....


(This article/teaching is from "Autobiography of a Yogi".)

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