The Devachanic Plane, Or, The Heaven World
About This Book
The Devachanic Plane, Or, The Heaven World is C.W. Leadbeater's clairvoyant account of the mental plane — the realm that the Theosophical tradition, drawing on the Sanskrit term for the divine realm, calls Devachan — where individual consciousness rests, assimilates, and prepares between physical incarnations. Leadbeater's account is characteristically detailed: he describes the seven sub-planes of the mental plane, the characteristic experience of each, the duration that individual souls typically spend at each level (correlated with the degree of mental and spiritual development reached in the preceding life), and the specific process by which the ego gradually withdraws from the lower mental levels through the higher and eventually rests in the causal body before beginning its descent into a new incarnation.
The book is particularly important for understanding the Theosophical cosmology of death and rebirth because it addresses the 'middle period' — the time between death (when the soul leaves the astral plane and enters the devachanic state) and rebirth — that most accounts either ignore or treat superficially. What Leadbeater describes is not a static heaven but a dynamic process of assimilation — the ego working through the experiences of the life just completed, extracting from them the essence of what was learned, and building from this essence the qualities and capacities that will be expressed in the next incarnation.
What You'll Learn
• Understand the seven sub-planes of the devachanic plane: the specific qualities and characteristics of each, what the experience of consciousness is like at each level, and how the sub-plane at which an individual soul rests in Devachan is determined by the level of development reached in the preceding life
• Grasp the devachanic experience: what Leadbeater describes as the subjective experience of Devachan — the characteristic quality (intensely blissful, characterised by the fulfilment of one's highest aspirations and most meaningful relationships in idealised form), its duration (longer for those with more developed mental and spiritual vehicles), and its ultimate purpose
• Recognise the assimilation process: what the ego does in Devachan — the specific process of extracting from the life's experiences the essence of what was genuinely learned and permanently developing those qualities, discarding what was merely surface pattern and not genuinely integrated — and how this process determines the specific endowments and tendencies of the next incarnation
• Learn the relationship between the causal body and the devachanic experience: how the causal body (the vehicle of the higher self, the repository of all that has been permanently developed across incarnations) is the stage on which the devachanic drama unfolds — and how the development of the causal body through successive incarnations constitutes the real progress of the individual soul toward liberation
• Appreciate the consolation dimension: how Leadbeater's detailed account of Devachan provides a coherent and specific framework for understanding what happens to loved ones who have died — not as vague spiritual reassurance but as a precise account of what the Theosophical tradition says the consciousness actually does during the period between incarnations
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