Karma

Author(s): Annie Besant
Publisher: Theosophical Publishing House

Page 45

35
loka. As the soul rises from the lower levels to the higher, the mental images built from the materials of the lower levels lose these elements, thus becoming latent in consciousness, or what H. P. Blavatsky used to call “privations of matter", capable of existing but out of material manifestation. The kāma-rūpic vesture is purified of its grosser elements as the Lower Ego is drawn upwards, or inwards, towards the devachanic region, each cast-off “shell” disintegrating in due course, until the last is doffed and the ray is completely withdrawn, free from all astral encasement. On the return of the Ego towards earth-life, these latent images will be thrown outwards and will attract to themselves the appropriate kāmic materials, which make them capable of manifestation on the astral plane, and they will become the appetites, passions and lower emotions of his desire-body for his new incarnation.
We may remark in passing that some of the mental images encircling the newly arrived soul are the source of much trouble during the earlier stages of the postmortem life; superstitious beliefs presenting themselves as mental images torture the soul with pictures of horrors that have no place in its real surroundings.1
1 See The Astral Plane, C. W. Leadbeater, pp. 45, 46.