On these
regions, William Atkinson in his book "Life
beyond death" explained the following:
« In
the quotation from the occult writer, given in the preceding chapter, the
following statement is made: “Each man is his own absolute law‑giver, the dispenser of glory or gloom
to himself, the decreer of his life, his reward, his punishment.” And this is
true not only in earth-life, but
also doubly true of the life of the soul on the Astral Plane. For each
disembodied soul carries with it its own heaven or hell, of its own creation,
and of its favorite belief, and partakes of the blessings or sorrows of each,
according to its merits. But the Judge who sentences it to reward or punishment
is not a Power outside of itself, but a Power Within — in short, its own conscience.
On the Astral Plane
the conscience of the soul asserts itself very forcibly, and the still, quiet
voice, that was perhaps smothered during earth-life,
now speaks in trumpet-like
tones, and the soul hears and obeys.
A man’s own
conscience, when allowed to speak clearly and forcibly, is the most severe
Judge that exists. Stripping aside all self-deception,
and hypocrisy, conscious or unconscious, it causes the soul to stand forth
naked and bare to its own spiritual gaze. And the soul, speaking as its own
conscience, sentences itself in accordance with its own conceptions of right
and wrong, and accepts its fate as merited and just. Man can fly from the
judgment of others — but he can never escape from his own conscience on the
Astral Plane. He finds himself unable to escape from the judgment seat of
conscience, and he leads himself away to his reward or punishment. Such is the
poetic justice of Nature, which far exceeds any conception of mortal man in his
religious speculations.
And, note the
absolute equity and justice of it all. Man is judged according to the highest
standards of his own soul, which, of course, represent the standards of his
time and environment. The best in himself —the highest of which he is capable— judges
and passes upon all in him below that standard. The result of this is that what
the highest reason conceives as absolute justice is meted out by the soul to
itself. The leading thinkers of the race almost unanimously agree that any
arbitrary standard of punishment, such as is expressed by the criminal codes of
the race, must necessarily fall far short of meting out invariable actual
justice. For the environment and education of the criminal may have been such
that the commission of the crime is almost natural to him; while the same
crime, committed by another, would be the result of a direct betrayal of his
conscience and a breaking of a moral law of which he is fully aware and
conscious. We would hardly call it criminal for the fox to steal a chicken, or
for the cat slyly to lap milk from the bowl on the table. There are many human
beings whose sense of moral right and wrong is but little above that of the
above named animals. Therefore, even human law, at least theoretically aims not
to punish, but to restrain by example and precept.
In connection with
the thought expressed in the preceding paragraph, we must remember that
absolute justice has no place for punishment
as such. As we have said, theoretically at least, even human law does not seek
to punish the criminal, but merely seeks the following ends, viz:
1.
To warn others not to commit a like crime.
2.
To restrain the criminal from committing
further crime, by confining him, or by imposing other deterring penalties.
3.
To reform the criminal by pointing out the
advantages of right action and the disadvantage of wrong action.
This being true even
of finite human law, what should we expect of infinite cosmic law, in this
particular?
Surely, nothing more
or less than a discipline which should encourage the unfoldment of the “good”
qualities of the soul, and the smothering of the “evil” ones. And this is just
what the advanced occultist does find to exist on the Astral Plane.
In this connection,
it must be remembered that the discipline which would appeal most to the soul
of lowly ideals, would be without avail in the case of the cultured soul — and
vice versa. In short, it may truthfully be said that the nature of the
appropriate discipline in each individual case is well expressed by the ideal
of heaven and hell entertained by the individual in earth-life,
and which ideal, of course, remains with the soul after it has passed from the
body to the Astral Plane.
The mind of certain
individuals is fully satisfied with the ideals of a lake of brimstone for
sinners, and the pleasant abode in a golden-streeted
heaven, with accompaniments of harp and crown, for the blessed.
Others, far advanced
beyond this stage, having left behind them the old ideas of a heaven in space
and a hell of torment, think that the greatest happiness possible to themselves
would be a state or condition in which they could see their ideals made real,
their highest aims realized, their dreams come true; and their greatest
punishment a condition in which they could follow up to its logical result the
evil they have done.
And, both of these
classes of souls find on the Astral Plane the heavens and hells of which they
have thought — for both have created their heaven or hell from the material of
their own inner consciousness. And such mental conceptions lack nothing of
reality to those who are conscious of them — the joy and suffering lose nothing
of effect by reason of the absence of the physical body.
On the Astral Plane,
the “sinner” who believes in a hell of brimstone and flames, which awaits him
by reason of the foul crimes done in his days of nature,” is not disappointed.
His beliefs supply the necessary environment, and his conscience condemns him
to the punishment in which he believes.
Even if he has sought
to disbelieve these things by the use of his reason, and still retains the
subconscious memories of his childhood teachings or the traditions of his race,
he will find himself in the same condition. He will undergo the traditional
tortures and suffering (all in his imagination of course) until — he receives a
valuable disciplinary lesson, the dim memories of which will haunt him in the
next incarnation. This, of course, is an extreme case.
There are many other
degrees and grades of “hells” carried over to the Astral Plane by souls of
various shades of religious belief. Each has the punishment which is best
adapted to exert a deterring influence and effect over him in his next life.
The same is true of
the ideal of “heaven,” The soul finds itself enjoying the bliss of the blessed,
according to its own ideals, for the good deeds and acts it has to its credit
in the infallible books of its memory. Inasmuch as no soul has been altogether
“bad,” nor none absolutely “good,” it follows that each soul has a taste both
of reward and punishment, according to its merits as determined by its awakened
conscience. Or, stating it in another way, the conscience “strikes an average”
for it, which average, likewise, agrees in detail with the prevailing belief of
the soul.
Those who in earth-life
have deliberately brought themselves to the conviction that there is no
“hereafter” for the soul, have a peculiar experience. They meet with their kind
on a plane in which they imagine that they have been transplanted to another
planet and are still in the flesh. And there they are made participants in a
great drama of Karma, being made to suffer for the miseries which they have
wrought upon others, and to enjoy blessings which they have bestowed upon
others.
They are not punished
for the unbelief —that would be unthinkable injustice— but they learn the
lesson of right and wrong in their own way. This experience, likewise, is
purely mental, and arises merely from the expression in Astral manifestation of
the memories of their earth-life,
urged on by the awakened conscience which gives them “an eye for an eye, and a
tooth for a tooth,” with a vengeance.
Belief or disbelief
in a future state, does not alter the cosmic law of compensation and Astral
“purgation.” The laws of Karma cannot be defeated by a refusal to believe in a
hereafter, nor a refusal to admit the distinction between right and wrong.
Every human being has, deep down under the surface though it may be, an
intuitive realization of a survival of the soul; and every individual has a
deep-seated consciousness of some sort of a
moral code. And these subconscious beliefs and opinions come to the surface on
the Astral Plane.
Those advanced souls
who have given us the best and highest reports of the life of the soul on “the
other side,” agree in informing us that the highest bliss, and the deepest
sorrow, of the disembodied soul of intelligence and culture, comes in the one
case from perceiving the effect of the good actions and thoughts of its earth-life,
and, in the other case, from a similar perception of the results of the evil
thoughts and actions of its earth-life.
When the eyes of the
soul are cleared so that they may discern the tangled fabric of cause and
effect, and follow up each particular thread of its own insertion therein, it
has in itself a heaven and a hell of greater intensity than anything of which
Dante ever dreamed. There is no joy of the disembodied soul comparable to that
experienced from perceiving the logical results of a right action and no sorrow
equal to that of perceiving the result of evil action, with its sickening
thought of “it might have been otherwise.”
(I suspect that this asseveration, William
Atkinson copied it from Max Heindel who in chapter three of his book "The Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception"
assured that in the world of desires, the human reviews the incidents he had
during his earthly life, and each damage he caused to others, he suffers intensely, and vice versa. But that
is false.)
But, even these
things pass away from the soul. In fact, they often occupy but a moment of
time, which seems to the soul as an eternity. There is no such thing as eternal
bliss or eternal pain, on the Astral Plane. These things pass away, and the
soul emerges once more on earth-life, to
once more enroll itself in the School of Life, the Kindergarten of God, there
to learn and re‑learn its
lessons. And remember, always, that both the heaven and the hell of each and
every soul, abides in that soul itself.
Each soul creates its
own heaven and hell — for neither have any objective existence. The heaven and
hell of each soul is the result of its Karma, and is purely a mental creation
of its own being. But the phenomena is none the less real to the soul, for this
reason. There is nothing in its earth-life which
ever seemed more real to it. And again, remember, that heaven and hell, on the
Astral Plane, are not given as bribe or punishment, respectively — but merely
as a natural means of developing and unfolding the higher qualities and
restraining the lower, to the end that the soul may advance on the Path.
So, once more, we see
that in the words quoted at the beginning of this chapter: “Each man is his own
absolute law‑giver, the
dispenser of glory or gloom to himself, the decreer of his own life, his
reward, his punishment,” on the Astral Plane. But life on the Astral Plane does
not consist entirely of heaven and hell. There are joys experienced which have
naught to do with the good or evil deeds of earth-life,
but which arise from the urge to express one’s own creative faculties, and to
exercise the intellect with increased power — the joys of expression and
knowledge, beyond which mortal cannot hope to experience. In our next chapter
we shall consider these phases of life on the Astral Plane. »
(Chapter 11)
OBSERVATION
While it is true that
you self create your own heaven or your own hell, and these are not eternal as
affirm Christianity, but depend on the karma that one has generated.
For the rest of what
William Atkinson said in this chapter, he is wrong, because Master Kuthumi
pointed out that the post-mortem period is a period of rest, and with the
exception of those who were extremely bad, all other humans (although they have
been quite bad) they will also have a period of rest and happiness during their
stay in the afterlife.
Master Kuthumi
explained it by saying:
« Bad
but tremendously bad must have been an individual so that he does not have a
moment in paradise. Instead, all those who have not slipped down into the mire
of unredeemable sin and bestiality, they go to Heaven.
The bad karma that
they have generated during their earthly life is put aside for the moment to
later follow them in their future reincarnation. They only carry with them to
their Devachan the positive karma of their good deeds, words and thoughts.
Later when they
reincarnate they will have to pay for their sins, whether they want to or not.
Meanwhile, they are rewarded by receiving the effects of the positive causes
produced by them on Earth. »
(ML16, p.101)
And that is why
Theosophy explains that the true hell is found on the physical plane, because
it is on Earth where humans have to deal with the negative karma that they have
built up and not on the astral plane as William Atkinson claims.
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