The mysterious causal world

The causal world is indescribably subtle.

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.

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.”

When a soul finally gets out of the 3 jars of bodily delusions, 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 3 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 3 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 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.

Karma

The physical karma or desires of man must be completely worked out before his permanent stay in astral worlds becomes possible.

Two kinds of beings live in the astral spheres.

1. Those who still have earthly karma to dispose of

These must reinhabit a gross physical body in order to pay their karmic debts.

These are 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.

2. Those who are freed forever from all material longings

These are the normal or long-established residents of the astral universe.

They do not need to return 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.

(Yogananda: the Hindu scriptures refer to the causal and astral worlds and to man’s 3 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 3 bodies is expressed in many ways through his threefold nature.

In the wakeful state on earth a human being is conscious more or less of his three vehicles. When he is sensuously intent on tasting, smelling, touching, listening, or seeing, he is working principally through his physical body.

Visualizing or willing, he is working mainly through his astral body. His causal medium finds expression when man is thinking or diving deep in introspection or meditation; the cosmical thoughts of genius come to the man who habitually contacts his causal body.

In this sense an individual may be classified broadly as ‘a material man,’ ‘an energetic man,’ or ‘an intellectual man.’

A man identifies himself about sixteen hours daily with his physical vehicle.

Then he sleeps; if he dreams, he remains in his astral body, effortlessly creating any object even as do the astral beings. If man’s sleep be deep and dreamless, for several hours he is able to transfer his consciousness, or sense of I-ness, to the causal body; such sleep is revivifying. A dreamer is contacting his astral and not his causal body; his sleep is not fully refreshing.