n, the
Devaland, or land of the Gods.[27] And one of the chief difficulties
has arisen from the free use of the words illusion, dream-state, and
other similar terms, as denoting the devachanic consciousness--a
general sense of unreality having thus come to pervade the whole
conception of Devachan. When the Eastern thinker speaks of the present
earthly life as Maya, illusion, dream, the solid Western at once puts
down the phrases as allegorical and fanciful, for what can be less
illusory, he thinks, than this world of buying and selling, of
beefsteaks and bottled stout. But when similar terms are applied to a
state beyond Death--a state which to him is misty and unreal in his
own religion, and which, as he sadly feels, is lacking in all the
substantial comforts dear to the family man--then he accepts the words
in their most literal and prosaic meaning, and speaks of Devachan as a
delusion in his own sense of the word. It may be well, therefore, on
the threshold of Devachan to put this question of "illusion" in its
true light.

In a deep metaphysical sense all that is conditioned is illusory. All
phenomena are literally "appearances", the outer masks in which the
One Reality shows itself forth in our changing universe. The more
"material" and solid the appearance, the further is it from Reality,
and therefore the more illusory it is. What can be a greater fraud
than our body, so apparently solid, stable, visible and tangible? It
is a constantly changing congeries of minute living particles, an
attractive centre into which stream continually myriads of tiny
invisibles, that become visible by their aggregation at this centre,
and then stream away again, becoming invisible by reason of their
minuteness as they separate off from this aggregation. In comparison
with this ever-shifting but apparently stable body how much less
illusory is the mind, which is able to expose the pretensions of the
body and put it in its true light. The mind is constantly imposed on
by the senses, and Consciousness, the most real thing in us, is apt to
regard itself as the unreal. In truth, it is the thought-world that is
the nearest to reality, and things become more and more illusory as
they take on more and more of a phenomenal character.

Again, the mind is permanent as compared with the transitory physical
world. For the "mind" is only a clumsy name for the living Thinker in
us, the true and conscious Entity, the inner Man, "that was, that is