Karma

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

Page 46

36
All the mental images formed from the passions and appetites are subjected to the process above described, to be remanifested by the ego on its return to earthlife, and as the writer of the Astral Plane says:
The LIPIKA, the great Karmic deities of the Kosmos, weigh the deeds of each personality when the final separation of its principles takes place in Kāma Loka, and give as it were the mould of the Etheric Double exactly suitable to its Karma for the man's next birth.
Freed for the time from these lower elements, the soul passes on into devachan, where it spends a time proportionate to the wealth or poverty of its mental images pure enough to be carried into that region. Here it finds again every one of its loftier efforts, however brief it may have been, however fleeting, and here it works upon them, building out of these materials powers for its coming lives.
The devachanic life is one of assimilation; the experiences collected on earth have to be worked into the texture of the soul, and it is by these that the ego grows; its development depends on the number and variety of the mental images it has formed during its earth-life, and transmuted into their appropriate and more permanent types. Gathering together all the mental images of a special class, it extracts from them
1 See The Astral Plane, C. W. Leadbeater, p. 86.