No matter how long we may keep the Spirit from passing out, however, at
last there will come a time when no stimulant can hold it and the last breath
is drawn. Then the silver cord of which the Bible speaks, and which holds the
higher and the lower vehicles together, snaps in the heart and causes that
organ to stop. That rupture releases the vital body, and it, with the desire
body and mind, floats above the visible body for from one to three and
one-half days, while the Spirit is engaged in reviewing the past life, an
exceedingly important part of its post-mortem experience. Upon that review
depends its whole existence from death to a new birth.
The question may arise in the student's mind: "How can we review our past
life from the cradle to the grave, when we do not even remember what we did a
month ago? To form a proper basis for our future life, this record ought to be
very accurate, but even the best memory is faulty." When we understand the
difference between the conscious and subconscious memory and the manner in
which the latter operates, the difficulty vanishes. This difference and the
manner in which the subconscious memory keeps an accurate record of our life
experiences may be best understood by an illustration, as follows: When we go
into a field and view the surrounding landscape, vibrations in the ether carry
to us a picture of everything within the range of our vision. It is as sad as
it is true, however, that "we have eyes and see not," as the Saviour said.
These vibrations impinge upon the retina of our eyes, even to the very
smallest details, but they usually do not penetrate to our consciousness, and
therefore are not remembered. Even the most powerful impressions fade in the
course of time, so that we cannot call them back at will when they are stored
in our conscious memory.
When a photographer goes afield with his camera, the results which he
obtains are different. The ether vibrations emanating from all things upon
which his camera is focused, transmit to the sensitive plate an impression of
the landscape, true to the minutest detail; and, mark this well, this true and
accurate picture is in no wise dependent upon whether the photographer is
observant or not. It will remain upon the plate and may be reproduced under
proper conditions. Such is the subconscious memory, and it is generated
automatically by each of us during every moment of time, independently of our
volition, in the following manner: From the first breath which we draw after
birth to aour last dying gasp we inspire air which is charged with pictures of
our surroundings, and the same ether which carries that picture to the retina
of our eye is inhaled into our lungs where it enters the blood. Thus it
reaches the heart in due time. In the left ventricle of that organ, near the
apex, there is one little atom which is particularly sensitized and which
remains in the body all through life. It differs in this respect from all
other atoms which come and go, for it is the particular property of God, and
of a certain Spirit. This atom may be called the book of the Recording Angel,
for as the blood passes through the heart, cycle after cycle, the pictures of
our good and evil acts are inscribed thereon to the minutest detail. This
record may be called the subconscious memory. It forms the basis of our future
life when reproduced as a panorama just subsequent to death. By removal of the
seed atom — which corresponds to the sensitized plate in a camera — the
reflecting ether of the vital body serves as a focus, and as the life unrolls
slowly, backwards, from death to birth the pictures thereof are etched into
the desire body, which will be our vehicle during our sojourn in Purgatory and
the First Heaven where evil is eradicated and good assimilated, so that in a
future life the former may serve as conscience to withhold the man from
repeating mistakes of the past, and the latter will spur him to greater good.
A phenomenon similar to the panorama of life usually takes place where a
person is drowning. People who have been resuscitated speak of having seen
their whole life in a flash. That is because under such conditions the vital
body also leaves the dense body. Of course there is no rupture of the silver
cord, or life could not be restored. Unconsciousness follows quickly in
drowning, while in the usual post-mortem review the consciousness continues
until the vital body collapses in the same manner that it does when we go to
sleep. Then consciousness ceases for a while and the panorama is terminated.
Therefore also the time occupied by the panorama varies with different
persons, according to whether the vital body was strong and healthy, or had
become thin and emaciated by protracted illness. The longer the time spent in
review, and the more quiet and peaceful the surroundings, the deeper will be
the etching which is made in the desire body. As already said, that has a most
important and far-reaching effect, for then the sufferings which the Spirit
will realize in Purgatory on account of bad habits and misdeeds will be much
keener than if there is only a slight impression, and in a future life the
still small voice of conscience will warn much more insistently against
mistakes which caused sufferings in the past.
When conditions are such at the time of death that the Spirit is disturbed
by outside conditions, as for instance the din and turmoil of a battle, the
harrowing conditions of an accident, or the hysterical wailings of relatives,
the distraction prevents it from realizing an appropriate depth in the etching
upon the desire body. Consequently its post-mortem existence becomes vague and
insipid; the Spirit does not harvest the fruits of experience as it should
have done had it passed out of the body in peace and under normal conditions.
It would therefore lack incentive to good in a future life, and miss the
warning against evil which a deep etching of the panorama of life would have
given. Thus its growth would be retarded in a very marked degree, but the
beneficent Powers in charge of evolution take certain steps to compensate for
our ignorant treatment of the dying and other untoward circumstances
mentioned. What these steps are, we shall discuss when considering the life of
children in heaven; for the present let it be sufficient to say that in God's
kingdom every evil is always transmuted to a greater good, though the process
may not be at once apparent.
Purgatory
During life the collapse of the vital body at night terminates our view of
the world about us, and causes us to lose ourselves in the unconsciousness of
sleep. When the vital body collapses just subsequent to death, and the
panorama of life is terminated, we also lose consciousness for a time which
varies according to the individual. A darkness seems to fall upon the Spirit;
then after a while it wakes up and begins dimly to perceive the light of the
other world, but is only gradually accustomed to the altered conditions. It is
an experience similar to that which we have when coming out of a darkened room
into sunlight, which blinds us by its brilliancy, until the pupils of our eyes
have contracted so that they admit a quantity of light bearable to our
organism.
If under such a condition we turn momentarily from the bright sunlight and
look back into the darkened room, objects there will be much plainer to our
vision than things outside which are illumined by the powerful rays of the
Sun. So it is also with the Spirit; when it has first been released from the
body it perceives sights, scenes, and sounds of the material world which it
has just left much more readily than it observes the sights of the world it is
entering. Wordsworth in his "Ode To Immortality" noted a similar condition in
the case of newborn children, who are all clairvoyant and much more awake to
the spiritual world than to this present plane of existence. Some lose the
spiritual sight very early, others retain it for a number of years, and a few
keep it all through life, but as the birth of a child is a death in the
spiritual world and it retains the spiritual sight for a time, so also death
here is a birth upon the spiritual plane, and the newly dead retain a
consciousness of this world for some time subsequent to demise.
When one awakes in the Desire World after having passed through
aforementioned experiences, the general feeling seems to be one of relief from
a heavy burden, a feeling perhaps akin to that of a diver encased in a heavy
rubber suit, a weighty brass helmet upon his head, leaden soles under his
feet, and heavy weights of lead upon his breast and back, confined in his
operations on the bottom of the ocean by a short length of air tube, and able
to move only clumsily and with difficulty. When after the day's work such a
man is hauled to the surface, and divests himself of his heavy garments and he
moves about with the facility we enjoy here, he must surely experience a
feeling of great relief. Something like that is felt by the Spirit when it has
been divested of the mortal coil and is able to roam all over the globe
instead of being confined to the narrow environment which bound it upon Earth.
There is also a feeling of relief for those who have been ill. Sickness,
such as we know it, does not exist there. Neither is it necessary to seek food
and shelter, for in that world there is neither heat nor cold. Nevertheless,
there are many in the purgatorial region who go to all the bothers of
housekeeping, eating and drinking just as we do here. George Du Maurier in his
novel, "Peter Ibbettson," gives a very good idea of this condition, in his
life lived between the hero and the Countess of Towers. This novel also
illustrates splendidly what has been said of the subconscious memory, for
George DuMaurier has somewhere, somehow discovered an easy method which anyone
may apply to do what he calls "dreaming true." By taking a certain position in
going to sleep, it is possible, after a little practice, to compel the
appearance, in a dream, of any scene in our past life, which we desire to live
over again. The book is well worth reading on that account.
When a fiery nebulae has been formed in the sky and commences to revolve, a
little matter in the center where motion is slowest commences to crystallize.
When it has reached a certain density it is caught in the swirl, and whirled
nearer, and nearer to the outward extremity of what has, by that time, become
the equator of a revolving globe. Then it is hurled into space and discarded
from the economy of the revolving Sun.
This process is not accomplished automatically as scientists would have us
believe. Herbert Spencer rejected the nebular theory because it required a
First cause, which he denied (though unable to form a better hypothesis of the
formation of solar systems), but it is accomplished through the activity of a
Great Spirit, which we may call God or any other name we choose. As above, so
below, says the Hermetic axiom. Man, who is a lesser Spirit, also gathers
about himself spirit-substance, which crystallizes into matter and becomes the
visible body which the spiritual sight reveals as placed inside an aura of
finer vehicles. The latter are in constant motion. When the dense body is born
as a child it is extremely soft and flexible.
Childhood, youth, maturity, and old age are but so many different stages of
crystallization, which goes on until at last a point is reached where the
Spirit can no longer move the hardened body and it is thrown out from the
Spirit as the planet is expelled from the Sun. That is death — the commencement
of a disrobing process which continues in Purgatory. The low evil passions and
desires we cultivated during life have crystallized the desire-stuff in such a
manner that that also must be expelled. Thus the Spirit is purged of evil
under the same law that a sun is purged of the matter which later forms a
planet. If the life has been a reasonably decent one, the process of purgation
will not be very strenuous nor will the evil desires thus expurgated persist
for a long time after having been freed, but they quickly disintegrate. If, on
the other hand, an extremely vile life has been led, the part of the
expurgated desire nature may persist even to the time when the Spirit returns
to a new birth for further experience. It will then be attracted to him and
haunt him as a demon, inciting him to evil deeds which he himself abhors. The
story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is not a mere fanciful idea of Robert Louis
Stevenson, but is founded upon facts well known to spiritual investigators.
Such cases are extremes, of course, but they are nevertheless possible, and we
unfortunately have laws which convert such possibilities of probabilities in
the case of a certain class of so-called criminals. We refer to laws which
decree capital punishment as penalty for murder.
When a man is dangerous he should of course be restrained, but even apart
from the question of the moral right of a community to take the life of
anyone — which we deny — society by its very act of retaliatory murder defeats
the very end it would serve. If the vicious murderer is restrained under
whatever discipline is necessary in a prison, for a number of years until his
natural death, he will have forgotten his bitterness against his victim and
against society, and when he stands as a free Spirit in the Desire World, he
may even by prayer have obtained forgiveness and have become a good Christian.
He will then go on his way rejoicing, and will in the future life seek to help
those whom he hurt here.
When society retaliates and puts him to a violent death shortly after he has
committed the crime, he is most likely to feel himself as having been greatly
injured, and not without cause. Then such a character will usually seek to
"get even," as he calls it, going about for a long time inciting others to
commit murder and other crimes. Then we have am epidemic of murders in a
community, a condition not infrequent.
The regicide in Serbia shocked the Western world in 1914 by wiping out an
entire royal house in a most shockingly bloody manner, and the Minister of the
Interior was one of the chief conspirators. Later he wrote his memoirs, and
therein he writes that whenever the conspirators had tried to win anyone as a
recruit, they always succeeded when they burned incense. He did not know why,
but simply mentioned it as a curious coincidence.
To the mystic investigator the matter is perfectly clear. We have shown the
necessity of having a vehicle made of the materials of any world wherein we
wish to function. We usually obtain a physical vehicle by going through the
womb, or perhaps in a few special cases, from a particularly good
materializing medium, but where it is only necessary to work upon the brain
and influence someone else to act, we need but a vehicle made of such ether as
may be obtained from fumes of many different substances. Each kind attracts
different classes of Spirits, and there is no doubt that the incense burned at
meetings where the conspirators were successful was of a low and sensual order
and attracted Spirits who had a grudge against humanity in general and the
King of Serbia in particular. These malcontents were unable to injure the king
himself, but used a subtle influence which helped the conspirators in their
work. The released murderer who has a grudge against society on account of his
execution, may enter low gambling saloons where the fumes of liquor and
tobacco furnish ample opportunity for working upon the class of people who
congregate in such places, and the man whose spiritual sight has been
developed is often sadly impressed when he sees the subtle influences to which
those who frequent such places are exposed. It is a fact, of course, that a
man must be of a low caliber to be influenced by low thoughts, and that it is
as impossible to incite a person of benevolent character to do murder — unless
we put him into a hypnotic sleep — as to make a tuning fork which vibrates to C
sing by striking another attuned to the key of G. But the thoughts of both
living and dead constantly surround us, and no man ever thought out a high
spiritual philosophy under the influence of tobacco fumes or while imbibing
alcoholic stimulants. Were capital punishment, newspaper notoriety of
criminals, and the manufacture of liquor and tobacco eliminated from society,
the gun factories would soon cease to advertise and go out of business along
with most of the locksmiths. The police force would decrease, and jails and
taxes would be correspondingly minimized.
When a person enters Purgatory he is exactly the same person as before he
died. He has just the same appetites, likes and dislikes, sympathies and
antipathies, as before. There is one important difference, however, namely,
that he has no dense body wherewith to gratify his appetites. The drunkard
craves drink, in fact, far more than he did in this life, but has no stomach
which can contain liquor and cause the chemical combustion necessary to bring
about the state of intoxication in which he delights. He may and does enter
saloons where he interpolates his body into the body of the physical drunkard
so that he may obtain his desires at second hand, as it were, inciting his
victim to drink more and more.
Yet there is no true satisfaction. He sees the full glass upon the counter
but his spirit hand is unable to lift it. He suffers the tortures of Tantalus
until in time he realizes the impossibility of gratifying his base desire.
Then he is free to go on, so far as that vice is concerned. He has been purged
from that evil without intervention of an angry Deity or a conventional devil
with hell's flames and pitchfork to administer punishment, but under the
immutable law that as we sow so shall we reap, he has suffered exactly
according to his vice. If his craving for drink was of a mild nature, he would
scarcely miss the liquor which he cannot there obtain. If his desires were
strong and he simply lived for drink, he would suffer veritable tortures of
hell without need of actual flames. Thus the pain experienced in eradication of
his vice would be exactly commensurate with the energy he had expended upon
contracting the habit, as the force wherewith a falling stone strikes the
earth is proportionate to the energy expended in hurling it upwards into the
air.
Yet it is not the aim of God to "get even;" love is higher than law and in
His wonderful mercy and solicitude for our welfare He has opened the way of
repentance and reform whereby we may obtain forgiveness of sin, as taught by
the Lord of Love: the Christ. Not indeed contrary to law, for His laws are
immutable, but by application of a higher law, whereby we accomplish here that
which would otherwise be delayed until death had forced the day of reckoning.
The method is as follows:
In our explanation concerning the subconscious memory we noted that a record
of every act, thought, and word is transmitted by air and ether into our
lungs, thence to the blood, and finally inscribed upon the tablet of the
heart: a certain little "seed atom," which is thus the book of the Recording
Angels. It was later explained how this panorama of life is etched into the
desire body and forms the basis of retribution after death. When we have
committed a wrong and our conscience accuses us in consequence, and this
accusation is productive of sincere repentance accompanied by reform, the
picture of that wrong act will gradually fade from the record of our life, so
that when we pass out at death it will not stand accusingly against us. We
noted that the panorama of life unwinds backwards just after death. Later in
the purgatorial life it again passes before the spiritual vision of the man,
who then experiences the exact feeling of those whom he has wronged. He seems
to lose his or her identity for the time being and assumes the condition of
his one time victim, he experiences all the mental and physical suffering
himself which he inflicted upon others. Thus he learns to be merciful instead
of cruel, and to do right instead of wrong in a future life. But if he awakens
to a thorough realization of a wrong previous to his death, then, as said, the
feeling of sorrow for his victim and the restitution or redress which he gives
of his own free will makes the suffering after death unnecessary. Hence "his
sin is forgiven." The Western Mystery Teaching gives a scientific method
whereby an aspirant to the higher life may purge himself continually, and thus
be able entirely to avoid existence in Purgatory. Each night after retiring
the pupil reviews his or her life during the day in reverse order. He starts
to visualize as clearly as possible the scene which took place just before
retiring. He then endeavors to view impartially his actions in that scene,
examining them to see whether he did right or wrong. If the latter, he
endeavors to feel and realize as vividly as possible that wrong. For instance,
if he spoke harshly to someone, and upon later consideration finds it was not
merited, he will endeavor to feel exactly as that one felt whom he wronged and
at the very earliest opportunity to apologize for the hasty expression. Then
he will call up the next scene in backward succession which may perhaps be the
supper table. In respect of that scene he will examine himself as to whether
he ate to live, sparingly and of foods prepared without suffering to other
creatures of God (such as flesh foods that cannot be obtained without taking
life). If he finds that he allowed his appetite to run away with him and that
he ate gluttonously, he will endeavor to overcome these habits, for to live a
clean life we must have a clean body, and no one can live to his highest
possibilities while making his stomach a graveyard for the decaying corpses of
murdered animals.
Thus the pupil will continue to review each scene in reverse order from
night till morning, and to feel really sorry for whatever he has done amiss.
He will not neglect to feel glad either when he comes to a scene where he has
done well, and the more intensely he can feel, the more thoroughly he will
eradicate the record upon the tablet of the heart and sharpen his conscience,
so that as time goes on from year to year, he will find less cause for blame
and enhance his soul power enormously. Thus he will grow in a measure
impossible by any less systematic method, and there will be no necessity for
his stay in Purgatory after death.
This evening exercise, and another for the morning, if persistently
performed day by day will in time awaken the spiritual vision as they improve
life.
— This article was adapted from "The Rosicrucian Mysteries," by Max Heindel.
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