During one’s life on the mental plane, one is not conscious of the personal lives of one’s friends on the physical plane as it would obviously be impossible to be happy, if one looked back and saw those loved ones in sorrow or suffering. On the mental plane, there is no barrier between souls. The soul of one’s friend lives in the form one has created of it to the extent that the two can throb in sympathetic vibration to each other. One can have no touch with those with whom on earth one had any difference in the inner life or the ties were only of a physical or astral nature. Hence on the mental plane no enemy can enter for only sympathetic accord of mind and heart can draw individuals together. With those who are more advanced in evolution one comes in contact only to the extent one can respond to them.
There is an important difference between life on the mental plane and life on the astral plane. On the astral plane one meets one’s friends (during the sleep of their physical bodies) in their astral bodies, i.e., one is still dealing with their personalities. On the mental plane however, one does not meet one’s friends in the mental bodies which they use on earth. On the contrary, their egos build for themselves entirely new and separate mental vehicles. Instead of the consciousness of the personalities, the consciousness of the egos works through their mental vehicles. The mental plane activities of one’s friends are thus entirely separate in every way from the personalities of their physical lives. Hence any sorrow or trouble which may fall upon the personality of a living individual cannot in the least affect the thought form of which that person’s ego is using as an additional mental body. If in that manifestation one does not know of the sorrow of that personality, it would not cause any trouble at all because one would regard it from the point of view of the ego in the causal body i.e., as a lesson to be learnt, or karma to be worked out. In this point of view there is no delusion. On the contrary, it is the view of the lower personality which is the deluded one, for what the personality sees as troubles and sorrows, are to soul in the causal body mere steps on the upward path of evolution. On the mental plane, all that was valuable in the moral and mental experiences of the individual during the life just ended is worked out. These are gradually transmuted into definite moral and mental faculties which one will take with one to one’s next incarnation.
One does not work into the mental body the actual memory of the past, for the mental body in due course disintegrates. The memory of the past abides only in the individual life force itself, which has lived through it. However, the facts of past experience are worked into specific mental characteristics. For example if one has studied some subject deeply, the effect of that study will be the creation of a special faculty to acquire and master that subject when it is first presented to the individual in another incarnation.
One will be born with a special aptitude for that line of study and will absorb it easily. Everything thought upon the physical plane is thus utilised on the mental plane. Every aspiration is worked into a power, all frustrated efforts become faculties and abilities. As a master has said, that on the mental plane the ego collects only the nectar of the moral qualities of consciousness from every terrestrial personality.
One must strive to realise that the mental plane is a vast and splendid world of vivid life in which one is living now, as well as in the periods between physical incarnations. It is only one’s lack of development, the limitations imposed by the physical body that prevent one from fully realising that all the glory of the highest heaven is here and now.
This article has been taken from the book Life Beyond Death by Anil Sharma