present there saw her, even as the inhabitants of a city
imagined by one man are not seen by another man.       ^
She saw her king-, not of the age of the Padma-body that
died, but youthful as at twice eight years. And passing out
of the court she saw the light of the noonday sun, and towns
and rivers, hill^ valleys and mountains, all owning the sway
of the king. Later on she saw a sky filled with moon and
stars and planets.
Seeing all these things she suffered great perplexity and
wondered: ^Are they all dead, the citizens of. our earthly
capital P.'^5 (^1)
Then, with the help of Saras vati (^2), she found herself
again in a moment in her palace, and saw all there as it had
(1) [Padma is now in B^vaohan, and has created, the worl^d in which
he is living. He has peopled it with all the figures of his past, and is
living actively his royal life, the astral experiences having by no means
extinguished his longings for it. lilla is invisible, for no external
habitants of the mental plane affect the dfevaohanic consciousness, the
world of which is limited to the forms it can itself produce. Later we
shall meet the thought-form of Lila herself as oonsorb ot Padma. Lila's
perplexity aa to the dwellers in Padma's world may be shared by the
reader; how far were they ^real" ? The answer is that they were more
"real" than their astral plane or physical plane copies. We never know
in the three lower worlds more than the thought-form we create of our
friend; how much of our friend animates that thought-form depends
on two things—his own stage of development and our power of response
to him. The more of him we can answer to, the more of him will
vitalise our thought-form, but till we reach the Buddhio plane we cannot
know him as he is. Any number of thought-forms may be vitalised by
an Ego, as rays of one sun may illumine many vases ; as much of his
life as the form can. contain and transmit shines through it. It has
been observed in Devachan that an ego embodied on earth may be
•working actively in the thought-forms -inhabiting the "closed worlds*'
of many inhabitants of D^vaohan. A. B.]
(2) Prajnapti bodhena is the original Samskrt expression. It might
also mean "owing to the awaldng of knowledge"; but this would have no