utratma is the actor,
and its numerous and different incarnations are the actor's
parts. I suppose you would not apply to these parts, and so
much the less to their costumes, the term of personality.
Like an actor the soul is bound to play, during the cycle of
births up to the very threshold of Parinirvana, many such
parts, which often are disagreeable to it, but like a bee,
collecting its honey from every flower, and leaving the rest
to feed the worms of the earth, our spiritual individuality,
the Sutratma, collecting only the nectar of moral qualities
and consciousness from every terrestrial personality in which
it has to clothe itself, forced by Karma, unites at last all
these qualities in one, having then become a perfect being, a
Dhyan Chohan._[30]

It is very significant, in this connection, that every devachanic
stage is conditioned by the earth-stage that precedes it, and the Man
can only assimilate in Devachan the kinds of experience he has been
gathering on earth.

_A colourless, flavourless personality has a colourless,
feeble Devachanic state._[31]

Husband, father, student, patriot, artist, Christian, Buddhist--he
must work out the effects of his earth-life in his devachanic life; he
cannot eat and assimilate more food than he has gathered; he cannot
reap more harvest than he has sown seed. It takes but a moment to cast
a seed into a furrow; it takes many a month for that seed to grow into
the ripened ear; but according to the kind of the seed is the ear that
grows from it, and according to the nature of the brief earth-life is
the grain reaped in the field of Aanroo.

_There is a change of occupation, a continual change in
Devachan, just as much and far more than there is in the life
of any man or woman who happens to follow in his or her whole
life one sole occupation, whatever it may be, with this
difference, that to the Devachani this spiritual occupation
is always pleasant and fills his life with rapture. Life in
Devachan is the function of the aspirations of earth-life;
not the indefinite prolongation of that "single instant," but
its infinite developments, the various incidents and events
based upon and outflowing from that one "single moment" or
moments. The dreams of the objective become the realities of
the subjective existence.... The reward provided by Nature
for men who are ben