It’s also called that in theosophy as well. So kamaloka is also cosmologically you could see it as the moon plane, okay, the moon realm, the moon kingdom. And this doesn’t mean that when you’re passing away your astral body and your eye get together and go live and dance upon the moon, okay? You’re not living on the surface of the moon. You’re living in basically another realm that is technically between the earth and the moon that is also called like the sense realm or the desire realm. That’s often how it’s discussed in eastern teachings which go into quite a lot of detail about kamaloka and all the different locas within kamaloka.

So you’ll find in the eastern teachings especially that they got very thorough about the death process, good, bad, and the ugly. So the moon realm or kamaloka is an intermediary plane between the material world, right, our physical 3D earthly world and what we would technically call heaven or the higher planes. So kamaloka is an intermediary world, it’s a twilight world that is between the moon and the earth in a different substrate in a different realm. I don’t like using the word dimension or different vibration or different frequency because you know the moon realm or any of the realms that we talk about today that are technically the heavens, they are not earthly matter vibrating faster than we can see.

It’s actually a different substrate. So the moon realm is actually a different substrate than earthly matter, okay? As we’re going to see the mercurial plane of heaven is a different substrate than the moon plane and the earth plane and each plane requires transubstantiation of the form to enter which is where we’re going to get into the idea of the different gates of heaven and trials and purification and things like that is because you can’t just like change the vibrational frequency of an atom, right, or speed it up or do all these things that modern science thinks it can do by just messing around with an atom and get into these other realms.

You can maybe disturb them or poke a hole momentarily but you’re not going to get into the Mars realm or the moon realm or the Venus realm by just messing up, by just messing around with physical matter. Actual human being has to take on, an actual human being has to transubstantiate themselves and that is how you get into these higher planes. So there’s no getting into eternalness like the heavenly planes without the law of transubstantiation or transformation or transfiguration. You have to change your form in order to rise into these higher and higher realms of heaven and then when we reincarnate or we go through the process of rebirth, right, we’re actually taking on more and more matter and that is even a kind of ex-carnation or a kind of death where we’re taking on.

It’s a different kind of transubstantiation to lowering but it’s still, you’re still changing from one form to another, okay. Our modern science does not acknowledge that because it doesn’t acknowledge the spiritual world. Okay. Today many people fear death as it has been reduced to a dualistic period of judgment where either the greatest paradise is placed before you or the darkest hell. This reduction is not an accurate portrayal of death and has a detrimental effect on the individual’s consciousness. Often leading to fear, repression and spiritual paranoia and ultimately leading to a disconnection from their own soul.

To the spiritual reductionist the spiritual world becomes a dangerous and unforgiving place. Rituals originally created to assist the dying become empty superstitions that no longer provide the effect in which they were created to bring about. All of this fear and superstition around death brings about the question why? Why do we fear death exactly? Perhaps this can be answered when we understand the process of death through occult science. Here in the understanding of the soul and the spiritual world we find that when we fear death what we are really fearing is the confrontation with our own inner thoughts and feelings, the own climate of our inner world that we have created in our earthly life.

We thus fear the kind of confrontation with ourself, with our unconsciousness. Thus the more unconsciously we live the more we fear death. We fear entering into the cruelty and darkness that we have allowed to propagate within our own souls and we subconsciously know this during our life. The more we dedicate ourselves to a spiritual life the more our understanding of death matures the more we see it as a period of establishing equilibrium within the soul. When we view the soul upon passing once it has fully separated from the physical body it enters the space in the atmosphere between the moon and the earth.

Keep in mind that at this point the soul is not operating within the physical earthly plane but rather at a point in between the material world and the world of pure spirit a kind of twilight space. The space between the moon and the earth is twilight space is known in occult science as the lower astral plane. It is the space of transition where the soul releases itself from material world and prepares itself to enter into the world of pure spirit. In order to do this the soul must release all attachments and desires of material existence.

Thus the more attachments and desires for the material world and lower urges you build up the more difficult this period is for you. Thus this level called Kamaloka on the eastern path is also associated with the realm of burning desire or the sensation of burning desire. It is where the soul experiences all of its attachments and physical desires tenfold. Thus here the soul experiences its lust for food sex power money etc to such an intense degree that it makes a deep impression on the individual. The individual may also develop a feeling of spiritual lack if they did not create anything from their spirit and their life and existed only in the level of pure survival.

Thus this feeling in Kamaloka this kind of justice or this kind of burning desire really exists in order to orient the soul on a proper path and create the desire for it to unite with spirit in its next life. For those who have built a spiritual life on earth and do not seek to be fulfilled by material trappings this period is experienced as a kind of confusion a state of confusion or perhaps a nightmare. The experience is much less pronounced and the soul can move quickly beyond the lunar plane. When we examine this process of mirroring of the mirroring of one’s spiritual development or lack thereof in Kamaloka we can see how humanity came to fear death.

We can see why traditionally spiritual personalities have renounced the material world and dedicated themselves to living in such a way that the spiritual becomes their guide rather than the material. The more spiritually rich we make our life the more harmonious the death process can become. Rudolf Steiner mentions the location of Kamaloka or the moon realm saying if we start from the physical plane we have here seven subdivisions of the physical plane then would come seven subdivisions of the astral plane. Of these the three lowest coincide with the three highest of the physical plane.

We must regard the astral plane as being pushed together with the physical plane in such a way that the three uppermost sections of the physical plane are at the same time the three lowest sections of the astral plane. We can speak of a marginal zone that is the one which our souls cannot leave after death when they are still bound to the earth by desires. It is called Kamaloka. Author Manly P. Hall associates the first realm we experience after death this Kamaloka with the individual’s inner emotional world. He describes how when we die we retreat inward into ourselves into our emotional world.

He says they are dwelling subjectively those that enter into Kamaloka are dwelling subjectively. There is no particular locality he is in. He is in the midst of himself and that opens up difficulties. He is there in the midst of his own feelings inside of his emotional nature. He thinks he looks out to see landscapes flowers and other people but they only exist in him. This is one of those mysteries. This is one of those mysterious super dimensions even Ospensky did not quite grasp. All of the things he is known in life here are there but it is not there at all.

They are his own thoughts. As surely as we can be obsessed by our own thoughts here so can we be there and the quality of our experience in the desire world or emotional world is determined by our emotional consciousness. If we have a very hard stormy life here it is not going to be a good climate there. Not that we go anywhere but we have to get along with the chaos we have built and the karma is we have to live in our manly P hauls explanation of Kamaloka we perhaps begin to wonder how can we create a world within ourselves that allows for a peaceful transition in the life after death with this understanding we can no longer view our thoughts and emotions as fleeting pointless impulses that simply disappear instead we must see each emotion and thought as being a world we would potentially exist in after death.

Helena Blavatsky the founder of theosophy described Kamaloka in a similar fashion revealing that it is the semi-material plane to us subjective and invisible where the disembodied personalities the astral forms often called kama rupas remain until they fade out from it by the complete exhaustion of the effects of the mental impulses that created these idolons of human and animal passions and desires. Kamaloka is the Hades of the ancient Greeks and the Amenti of the Egyptians the land of silent shadows as a division of the first group of the trail of Kaya lastly occultist Dion Fortune who wrote the book through the gates of death described this period as a point of alchemical transmutation for the soul thus the experience of Kamaloka is a kind of alchemical purification that allows the soul to separate itself from the lower impulses it took on in earthly life in this way Kamaloka is actually helpful for us as a point of purification and ennoblement she says but these are not the flames of eternal torment but the cleansing fires that purify the soul as gold is tried in the furnace until its dross is burned away and it is pure and precious so
[tr:trw].