The dread of materialising mental and spiritual conceptions has always
been very strong among the Philosophers and oral Teachers of the far
East. Their constant effort has been to free the Thinker as far as
possible from the bonds of matter even while he is embodied, to open
the cage for the Divine Swallow, even though he must return to it for
awhile. They are ever seeking "to spiritualise the material", while in
the West the continual tendency has been "to materialise the
spiritual". So the Indian describes the life of the freed Soul in all
the terms that make it least material--illusion, dream, and so
on--whereas the Hebrew endeavours to delineate it in terms descriptive
of the material luxury and splendour of earth--marriage feast, streets
of gold, thrones and crowns of solid metal and precious stones; the
Western has followed the materialising conceptions of the Hebrew, and
pictures a heaven which is merely a double of earth with earth's
sorrows extracted, until we reach the grossest of all, the modern
Summerland, with its "spirit-husbands", "spirit-wives", and
"spirit-infants" that go to school and college, and grow up into
spirit-adults.

In "Notes on Devachan",[29] someone who evidently writes with knowledge
remarks of the Devachanî:

_The_ à priori _ideas of space and time do not control his
perceptions; for he absolutely creates and annihilates them
at the same time. Physical existence has its cumulative
intensity from infancy to prime, and its diminishing energy
from dotage to death; so the dream-life of Devachan is lived
correspondentially. Nature cheats no more the Devachanî than
she does the living physical man. Nature provides for him far