events--in providential protections and escapes,
for love is a strong shield, and is not limited by space or
time. As with this Devachanic "mother", so with the rest of
human relationships and attachments, save the purely selfish
or material.[45]

Remembering that a thought becomes an active entity, capable of
working good or evil, we easily see that as embodied Souls can send to
those they love helping and protecting forces, so the Devachani,
thinking of those dear to him, may send out such helpful and
protective thoughts, to act as veritable guardian angels round his
beloved on earth. But this is a very different thing from the "Spirit"
of the mother coming back to earth to be the almost helpless spectator
of the child's woes.

The Soul embodied may sometimes escape from its prison of flesh, and
come into relations with the Devachani. H.P. Blavatsky writes:

Whenever years after the death of a person his spirit is
claimed to have "wandered back to earth" to give advice to
those it loved, it is always in a subjective vision, in dream
or in trance, and in that case it is the Soul of the living
seer that is drawn to the _disembodied_ spirit, and not the
latter which wanders back to our spheres.[46]

Where the sensitive, or medium, is of a pure and lofty nature, this
rising of the freed Ego to the Devachani is practicable, and naturally
gives the impression to the sensitive that the departed Ego has come
back to him. The Devachani is wrapped in its happy "illusion", and

_The Souls, or astral Egos, of pure loving sensitives,
labouring under the same delusion, think their loved ones
come down to them on earth, while it is their own spirits
that are raised towards those in the Devachan._[47]

This attraction can be exercised by the departed Soul from Kamaloka or
from Devachan:

A "spirit" or the spiritual Ego, cannot _descend_ to the
medium, but it can _attract_ the spirit of the latter to
itself, and it can do this only during the two
intervals--before and after its "gestation period". Interval
the first is that period between the physical death and the
merging of the spiritual Ego into that state which is known
in the Arhat Esoteric Doctrine as "Bar-do". We have
translated this as the "gestation period", and it lasts from
a few days to several years, according to the evidence of the
Adepts. Interval the second lasts s