Autobiography of a Yogi
resistance in three-dimensional matter. When man’s desire to live
is severely shaken by disease or other causes, death arrives; the
heavy overcoat of the flesh is temporarily shed. The soul, however,
remains encased in the astral and causal bodies. {FN43-7} The adhesive
force by which all three bodies are held together is desire. The
power of unfulfilled desires is the root of all man’s slavery.
“Physical desires are rooted in egotism and sense pleasures. The
compulsion or temptation of sensory experience is more powerful
than the desire-force connected with astral attachments or causal
perceptions.
“Astral desires center around enjoyment in terms of vibration. Astral
beings enjoy the ethereal music of the spheres and are entranced
by the sight of all creation as exhaustless expressions of changing
light. The astral beings also smell, taste, and touch light.
Astral desires are thus connected with an astral being’s power to
precipitate all objects and experiences as forms of light or as
condensed thoughts or dreams.
“Causal desires are fulfilled by perception only. The nearly-free
beings who are encased only in the causal body see the whole universe
as realizations of the dream-ideas of God; they can materialize
anything and everything in sheer thought. Causal beings therefore
consider the enjoyment of physical sensations or astral delights
as gross and suffocating to the soul’s fine sensibilities. Causal
beings work out their desires by materializing them instantly.
{FN43-8} Those who find themselves covered only by the delicate veil
of the causal body can bring universes into manifestation even as
the Creator. Because all creation is made of the cosmic dream-texture,
the soul thinly clothed in the causal has vast realizations of
power.
“A soul, being invisible by nature, can be distinguished only by
the presence of its body or bodies. The mere presence of a body
signifies that its existence is made possible by unfulfilled desires.
{FN43-9}
“So long as the soul of man is encased in one, two, or three
body-containers, sealed tightly with the corks of ignorance and
desires, he cannot merge with the sea of Spirit. When the gross
physical receptacle is destroyed by the hammer of death, the other
two coverings-astral and causal-still remain to prevent the soul
from consciously joining the Omnipresent Life. When desirelessness
is attained through wisdom, its power disintegrates the two remaining
vessels. The tiny human soul emerges, free at last; it is one with
the Measureless Amplitude.”
I asked my divine guru to shed further light on the high and
mysterious causal world.
“The causal world is indescribably subtle,” he replied. “In order
to understand it, one would have to possess such tremendous powers
of concentration that he could close his eyes and visualize the
astral cosmos and the physical cosmos in all their vastness-the
luminous balloon with the solid basket-as existing in ideas only.
If by this superhuman concentration one succeeded in converting or
resolving the two cosmoses with all their complexities into sheer
ideas, he would then reach the causal world and stand on the
borderline of fusion between mind and matter. There one perceives
all created things—solids, liquids, gases, electricity, energy,
all beings, gods, men, animals, plants, bacteria-as forms of
consciousness, just as a man can close his eyes and realize that
he exists, even though his body is invisible to his physical eyes
and is present only as an idea.
“Whatever a human being can do in fancy, a causal being can do in
reality. The most colossal imaginative human intelligence is able,
in mind only, to range from one extreme of thought to another,
to skip mentally from planet to planet, or tumble endlessly down
a pit of eternity, or soar rocketlike into the galaxied canopy,
or scintillate like a searchlight over milky ways and the starry
spaces. But beings in the causal world have a much greater freedom,
and can effortlessly manifest their thoughts into instant objectivity,
without any material or astral obstruction or karmic limitation.
“Causal beings realize that the physical cosmos is not primarily
constructed of electrons, nor is the astral cosmos basically
composed of lifetrons-both in reality are created from the minutest
particles of God-thought, chopped and divided by MAYA, the law of
relativity which intervenes to apparently separate the Noumenon
from His phenomena.
“Souls in the causal world recognize one another as individualized
points of joyous Spirit; their thought-things are the only objects
which surround them. Causal beings see the difference between
their bodies and thoughts to be merely ideas. As a man, closing his
eyes, can visualize a dazzling white light or a faint blue haze, so
causal beings by thought alone are able to see, hear, feel, taste,
and touch; they create anything, or dissolve it, by the power of
cosmic mind.
“Both death and rebirth in the causal world are in thought.
Causal-bodied beings feast only on the ambrosia of eternally
new knowledge. They drink from the springs of peace, roam on the
trackless soil of perceptions, swim in the ocean-endlessness of
bliss. Lo! see their bright thought-bodies zoom past trillions of
Spirit-created planets, fresh bubbles of universes, wisdom-stars,
spectral dreams of golden nebulae, all over the skiey blue bosom
of Infinity!
“Many beings remain for thousands of years in the causal cosmos.
By deeper ecstasies the freed soul then withdraws itself from the
little causal body and puts on the vastness of the causal cosmos.
All the separate eddies of ideas, particularized waves of power,
love, will, joy, peace, intuition, calmness, self-control, and
concentration melt into the ever-joyous Sea of Bliss. No longer
does the soul have to experience its joy as an individualized wave
of consciousness, but is merged in the One Cosmic Ocean, with all
its waves-eternal laughter, thrills, throbs.
“When a soul is out of the cocoon of the three bodies it escapes
forever from the law of relativity and becomes the ineffable
Ever-Existent. {FN43-10} Behold the butterfly of Omnipresence, its
wings etched with stars and moons and suns! The soul expanded into
Spirit remains alone in the region of lightless light, darkless
dark, thoughtless thought, intoxicated with its ecstasy of joy in
God’s dream of cosmic creation.”
“A free soul!” I ejaculated in awe.
“When a soul finally gets out of the three jars of bodily delusions,”
Master continued, “it becomes one with the Infinite without any
loss of individuality. Christ had won this final freedom even before
he was born as Jesus. In three stages of his past, symbolized in
his earth-life as the three days of his experience of death and
resurrection, he had attained the power to fully arise in Spirit.
“The undeveloped man must undergo countless earthly and astral
and causal incarnations in order to emerge from his three bodies.
A master who achieves this final freedom may elect to return
to earth as a prophet to bring other human beings back to God, or
like myself he may choose to reside in the astral cosmos. There a
savior assumes some of the burden of the inhabitants’ karma {FN43-11}
and thus helps them to terminate their cycle of reincarnation in
the astral cosmos and go on permanently to the causal spheres. Or
a freed soul may enter the causal world to aid its beings to shorten
their span in the causal body and thus attain the Absolute Freedom.”
“Resurrected One, I want to know more about the karma which forces
souls to return to the three worlds.” I could listen forever,
I thought, to my omniscient Master. Never in his earth-life had I
been able at one time to assimilate so much of his wisdom. Now for
the first time I was receiving a clear, definite insight into the
enigmatic interspaces on the checkerboard of life and death.
“The physical karma or desires of man must be completely worked
out before his permanent stay in astral worlds becomes possible,”
my guru elucidated in his thrilling voice. “Two kinds of beings
live in the astral spheres. Those who still have earthly karma to
dispose of and who must therefore reinhabit a gross physical body
in order to pay their karmic debts could be classified, after
physical death, as temporary visitors to the astral world rather
than as permanent residents.
“Beings with unredeemed earthly karma are not permitted after
astral death to go to the high causal sphere of cosmic ideas, but
must shuttle to and fro from the physical and astral worlds only,
conscious successively of their physical body of sixteen gross
elements, and of their astral body of nineteen subtle elements.
After each loss of his physical body, however, an undeveloped being
from the earth remains for the most part in the deep stupor of the
death-sleep and is hardly conscious of the beautiful astral sphere.
After the astral rest, such a man returns to the material plane for
further lessons, gradually accustoming himself, through repeated
journeys, to the worlds of subtle astral texture.
“Normal or long-established residents of the astral universe,
on the other hand, are those who, freed forever from all material
longings, need return no more to the gross vibrations of earth.
Such beings have only astral and causal karma to work out. At astral
death these beings pass to the infinitely finer and more delicate
causal world. Shedding the thought-form of the causal body at the
end of a certain span, determined by cosmic law, these advanced
beings then return to Hiranyaloka or a similar high astral planet,
reborn in a new astral body to work out their unredeemed astral
karma.
“My son, you may now comprehend more fully that I am resurrected by
divine decree,” Sri Yukteswar continued, “as a savior of astrally
reincarnating souls coming back from the causal sphere, in
particular, rather than of those astral beings who are coming up
from the earth. Those from the earth, if they still retain vestiges
of material karma, do not rise to the very high astral planets like
Hiranyaloka.
“Just as most people on earth have not learned through meditation-acquired
vision to appreciate the superior joys and advantages of astral life
and thus, after death, desire to return to the limited, imperfect
pleasures of earth, so many astral beings, during the normal
disintegration of their astral bodies, fail to picture the advanced
state of spiritual joy in the causal world and, dwelling on thoughts
of the more gross and gaudy astral happiness, yearn to revisit the
astral paradise. Heavy astral karma must be redeemed by such beings
before they can achieve after astral death a permanent stay in the
causal thought-world, so thinly partitioned from the Creator.
“Only when a being has no further desires for experiences in the
pleasing-to-the-eye astral cosmos, and cannot be tempted to go
back there, does he remain in the causal world. Completing there
the work of redeeming all causal karma or seeds of past desires, the
confined soul thrusts out the last of the three corks of ignorance
and, emerging from the final jar of the causal body, commingles
with the Eternal.
“Now do you understand?” Master smiled so enchantingly!
“Yes, through your grace. I am speechless with joy and gratitude.”
Never from song or story had I ever received such inspiring knowledge.
Though the Hindu scriptures refer to the causal and astral worlds
and to man’s three bodies, how remote and meaningless those pages
compared with the warm authenticity of my resurrected Master! For
him indeed existed not a single “undiscover’d country from whose
bourn no traveller returns”!
“The interpenetration of man’s three bodies is expressed in many
ways through his threefold nature,” my great guru went on. “In