Q. What is the state of death of the victim of strong desire?
A. Take the case of the drunkard. He is just as fond of intoxicants after
death as before.
Q. How is this so without a dense body?
A. It is not the dense body that craves drink. It is made sick by alcohol
and would rather be without it. It vainly protests in different ways, but the
desire body of the drunkard craves the drink and forces the dense body to take
it, that the desire body may have the sensation of pleasure resulting from the
increased vibration.
Q. What becomes of that desire?
A. That desire remains after the death of the dense body, but the drunkard
has in his desire body neither mouth to drink nor stomach to contain physical
liquor.
Q. Would the atmosphere of a saloon avail him?
A. He may and does get into saloons, where he interpolates his body into
the bodies of the drinkers to get a little of their vibrations by induction,
but that is too weak to give him much satisfaction.
Q. Could he enjoy the fumes of whiskey?
A. He may and sometimes does get into a whiskey cask, but that is of no
avail either for there are in the cask no such fumes as are generated in the
digestive organs of a tippler. It has no effect upon him, and he is like a man
in an open boat upon the ocean, "Water, water, everywhere, but not a drop to
drink"; consequently he suffers intensely.
Q. What finally is his lot?
A. In time he learns the uselessness of longing for drink which he cannot
obtain. As with so many of our desires in the Earth life, all desires in the
Desire World die for want of opportunity to gratify them.
Q. Does he then leave this region?
A. When the drunkard has been purged he is ready, so far as this habit is
concerned, to leave Purgatory and ascend into the heaven world.
Q. Can we say that God inflicts this punishment?
A. No. This proves that it is not an avenging Deity that makes Purgatory
or hell for us but our own individual evil habits and acts.
Q. How long must we endure Purgatory?
A. According to the intensity of our desires will be the time and
suffering entailed in their expurgation. It would have been no suffering to
the drunkard to lose his worldly possessions. If he had any, he did not cling
to them. Neither would it cause a miser any pain to be deprived of
intoxicants. But a miser does care about his gold and the drunkard about his
drink, so the unerring law gives to each that which is needed to purge him of
his unhallowed desires and evil habits.
Q. Is such a teaching supported in the scriptures?
A. Yes, it is the law that says, "Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he
also reap." It is the Law of Cause and Effect which rules all things in the
three worlds, in every realm of Nature — physical, moral and mental. The
result may be manifest immediately or it may be delayed for years or for
lives, but sometime, somewhere, just and equal retribution will be made.
— Ref: The Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception — Rays from the Rose Cross Magazine, March, 1980, p. 115
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