Autobiography of a Yogi
through the help of their cosmic will into specially patterned,
astrally condensed forms. The recently physically disembodied being
arrives in an astral family through invitation, drawn by similar
mental and spiritual tendencies.
“The astral body is not subject to cold or heat or other
natural conditions. The anatomy includes an astral brain, or the
thousand-petaled lotus of light, and six awakened centers in the
SUSHUMNA, or astral cerebro-spinal axis. The heart draws cosmic
energy as well as light from the astral brain, and pumps it to
the astral nerves and body cells, or lifetrons. Astral beings can
affect their bodies by lifetronic force or by MANTRIC vibrations.
“The astral body is an exact counterpart of the last physical form.
Astral beings retain the same appearance which they possessed in
youth in their previous earthly sojourn; occasionally an astral
being chooses, like myself, to retain his old age appearance.”
Master, emanating the very essence of youth, chuckled merrily.
“Unlike the spacial, three-dimensional physical world cognized
only by the five senses, the astral spheres are visible to the
all-inclusive sixth sense-intuition,” Sri Yukteswar went on. “By
sheer intuitional feeling, all astral beings see, hear, smell,
taste, and touch. They possess three eyes, two of which are partly
closed. The third and chief astral eye, vertically placed on
the forehead, is open. Astral beings have all the outer sensory
organs-ears, eyes, nose, tongue, and skin-but they employ the
intuitional sense to experience sensations through any part of the
body; they can see through the ear, or nose, or skin. They are able
to hear through the eyes or tongue, and can taste through the ears
or skin, and so forth. {FN43-4}
“Man’s physical body is exposed to countless dangers, and is easily
hurt or maimed; the ethereal astral body may occasionally be cut
or bruised but is healed at once by mere willing.”
“Gurudeva, are all astral persons beautiful?”
“Beauty in the astral world is known to be a spiritual quality,
and not an outward conformation,” Sri Yukteswar replied. “Astral
beings therefore attach little importance to facial features. They
have the privilege, however, of costuming themselves at will with
new, colorful, astrally materialized bodies. Just as worldly men
don new array for gala events, so astral beings find occasions to
bedeck themselves in specially designed forms.
“Joyous astral festivities on the higher astral planets like
Hiranyaloka take place when a being is liberated from the astral
world through spiritual advancement, and is therefore ready to enter
the heaven of the causal world. On such occasions the Invisible
Heavenly Father, and the saints who are merged in Him, materialize
Themselves into bodies of Their own choice and join the astral
celebration. In order to please His beloved devotee, the Lord takes
any desired form. If the devotee worshiped through devotion, he
sees God as the Divine Mother. To Jesus, the Father-aspect of the
Infinite One was appealing beyond other conceptions. The individuality
with which the Creator has endowed each of His creatures makes every
conceivable and inconceivable demand on the Lord’s versatility!”
My guru and I laughed happily together.
“Friends of other lives easily recognize one another in the astral
world,” Sri Yukteswar went on in his beautiful, flutelike voice.
“Rejoicing at the immortality of friendship, they realize the
indestructibility of love, often doubted at the time of the sad,
delusive partings of earthly life.
“The intuition of astral beings pierces through the veil and
observes human activities on earth, but man cannot view the astral
world unless his sixth sense is somewhat developed. Thousands
of earth-dwellers have momentarily glimpsed an astral being or an
astral world.
“The advanced beings on Hiranyaloka remain mostly awake in ecstasy
during the long astral day and night, helping to work out intricate
problems of cosmic government and the redemption of prodigal
sons, earthbound souls. When the Hiranyaloka beings sleep, they
have occasional dreamlike astral visions. Their minds are usually
engrossed in the conscious state of highest NIRBIKALPA bliss.
“Inhabitants in all parts of the astral worlds are still subject
to mental agonies. The sensitive minds of the higher beings on
planets like Hiranyaloka feel keen pain if any mistake is made in
conduct or perception of truth. These advanced beings endeavor to
attune their every act and thought with the perfection of spiritual
law.
“Communication among the astral inhabitants is held entirely by
astral telepathy and television; there is none of the confusion and
misunderstanding of the written and spoken word which earth-dwellers
must endure. Just as persons on the cinema screen appear to move
and act through a series of light pictures, and do not actually
breathe, so the astral beings walk and work as intelligently guided
and coordinated images of light, without the necessity of drawing
power from oxygen. Man depends upon solids, liquids, gases, and
energy for sustenance; astral beings sustain themselves principally
by cosmic light.”
“Master mine, do astral beings eat anything?” I was drinking in his
marvelous elucidations with the receptivity of all my faculties-mind,
heart, soul. Superconscious perceptions of truth are permanently
real and changeless, while fleeting sense experiences and impressions
are never more than temporarily or relatively true, and soon lose
in memory all their vividness. My guru’s words were so penetratingly
imprinted on the parchment of my being that at any time, by
transferring my mind to the superconscious state, I can clearly
relive the divine experience.
“Luminous raylike vegetables abound in the astral soils,” he answered.
“The astral beings consume vegetables, and drink a nectar flowing
from glorious fountains of light and from astral brooks and rivers.
Just as invisible images of persons on the earth can be dug out of
the ether and made visible by a television apparatus, later being
dismissed again into space, so the God-created, unseen astral
blueprints of vegetables and plants floating in the ether are
precipitated on an astral planet by the will of its inhabitants.
In the same way, from the wildest fancy of these beings, whole
gardens of fragrant flowers are materialized, returning later to
the etheric invisibility. Although dwellers on the heavenly planets
like Hiranyaloka are almost freed from any necessity of eating,
still higher is the unconditioned existence of almost completely
liberated souls in the causal world, who eat nothing save the manna
of bliss.
“The earth-liberated astral being meets a multitude of relatives,
fathers, mothers, wives, husbands, and friends, acquired during
different incarnations on earth, {FN43-5} as they appear from time
to time in various parts of the astral realms. He is therefore at
a loss to understand whom to love especially; he learns in this way
to give a divine and equal love to all, as children and individualized
expressions of God. Though the outward appearance of loved ones
may have changed, more or less according to the development of new
qualities in the latest life of any particular soul, the astral
being employs his unerring intuition to recognize all those once dear
to him in other planes of existence, and to welcome them to their
new astral home. Because every atom in creation is inextinguishably
dowered with individuality, {FN43-6} an astral friend will be
recognized no matter what costume he may don, even as on earth an
actor’s identity is discoverable by close observation despite any
disguise.
“The span of life in the astral world is much longer than on earth.
A normal advanced astral being’s average life period is from five
hundred to one thousand years, measured in accordance with earthly
standards of time. As certain redwood trees outlive most trees by
millenniums, or as some yogis live several hundred years though
most men die before the age of sixty, so some astral beings live
much longer than the usual span of astral existence. Visitors
to the astral world dwell there for a longer or shorter period in
accordance with the weight of their physical karma, which draws
them back to earth within a specified time.
“The astral being does not have to contend painfully with death
at the time of shedding his 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 man has allowed his 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.
“Physical death is attended by the disappearance of breath and
the disintegration of fleshly cells. Astral death consists of the
dispersement of lifetrons, those manifest units of energy which
constitute the life of astral beings. At physical death a being
loses his consciousness of flesh and becomes aware of his subtle
body in the astral world. Experiencing astral death in due time, a
being thus passes from the consciousness of astral birth and death
to that of physical birth and death. These recurrent cycles of
astral and physical encasement are the ineluctable destiny of all
unenlightened beings. Scriptural definitions of heaven and hell
sometimes stir man’s deeper-than-subconscious memories of his long
series of experiences in the blithesome astral and disappointing
terrestrial worlds.”
“Beloved Master,” I asked, “will you please describe more in detail
the difference between rebirth on the earth and in the astral and
causal spheres?”
“Man as an individualized soul is essentially causal-bodied,” my
guru explained. “That body is a matrix of the thirty-five IDEAS
required by God as the basic or causal thought forces from which
He 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. 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 instruments of 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 the death of the
physical body, which is made of sixteen gross metallic and nonmetallic
elements.
“God thought out different ideas within Himself and projected them
into dreams. Lady Cosmic Dream thus sprang out decorated in all
her colossal endless ornaments of relativity.
“In thirty-five thought categories of the causal body, God elaborated
all the complexities of man’s nineteen astral and sixteen physical
counterparts. By condensation of vibratory forces, first subtle,
then gross, He produced man’s astral body and finally his physical
form. According to the law of relativity, by which the Prime
Simplicity has become the bewildering manifold, the causal cosmos
and causal body are different from the astral cosmos and astral body;
the physical cosmos and physical body are likewise characteristically
at variance with the other forms of creation.
“The fleshly body is made of the fixed, objectified dreams of the
Creator. The dualities are ever-present on earth: disease and health,
pain and pleasure, loss and gain. Human beings find limitation and