46. The Regions Of Darkness And Damnation

When you see pictures that must depict life in so-called hell, you shrug them off with a half-ironic, half-pitying smile and the thought that only a sick imagination or fanatical blind faith can conceive of scenes of this kind. Rarely will there be anyone who searches for even the shortest grain of truth in them. And yet the most horrific imagination can hardly come close to forming a picture that comes close to expressing the torments of life in the dark regions. Poor deluded people who think they can carelessly pass over it with a mocking shrug of the shoulders! The moment comes when carelessness takes bitter revenge with the shattering realization of the truth. No amount of resisting, no turning away will help, they will be drawn into the maelstrom that awaits them if they do not cast off this conviction of ignorance in time, which only ever characterizes the hollowness and narrow-mindedness of such a person.
 
No sooner has the detachment of the ethereal body from the gross material body taken placethan they find the first great surprise in the experience that conscious existence and life have not yet ended. The first consequence is confusion, followed by unexpected anxiety, which often turns into dull surrender or fearful despair! In vain then is the fretting, in vain all complaining, but also in vain the pleading; for they must reap what they sowed in earthly life.
 
If they mocked the Word brought to them by God, name that which refers to life after earthly death and the associated responsibility of every strong thought and action, the least that awaits them is what they wanted: utter darkness! Their ethereal eyes, ears and mouths are closed by their own will. They are deaf, blind and mute in their new environment. This is the most favourable thing that can happen to them. A guide and helper in the afterlife cannot make himself understood to them because they keep themselves closed off from it. This is a sad state of affairs that only the slow inner maturing of the person concerned, which leads through increasing despair, can bring about a gradual change. With the growing longing for light, which rises like an uninterrupted cry for help from such oppressed and tormented souls, it finally becomes gradually more luminous around him, until he also learns to see others who, like him, are in need of help. If he now endeavours to support those who are still waiting in utter darkness so that they too can become more luminous, he will grow stronger and stronger in this activity of trying to help through the effort required for this to happen, until someone else can come to him who has already progressed further in order to help him too, towards the lighter regions.
 
So they squat around gloomily, as their ethereal bodies are also too powerless to walk due to their unwillingness to do so. It therefore remains a laboured, insecure crawling on the ground when movement does occur. Others grope around in this darkness, stumble, fall, pick themselves up again and again, only to bump into something here or there, causing painful wounds; for since a human soul only ever sinks into the region that corresponds exactly to its ethereal gravity, i.e. is of the same kind of ethereality, through the nature of its own darkness, which goes hand in hand with the more or less strong density, which in turn entails a corresponding weight, its new surroundings become just as tangible, palpable and impenetrable for it as it is for a gross ethereal body in a gross ethereal environment. Every impact, every fall or every injury is therefore felt there as painfully as it was felt by its gross material body during its earthly occupation on the gross material earth.
 
It is the same in every region, whichever depth or height it belongs to. Same world of matter, same perceptibility, same mutual impenetrability. Every higher region, however, or every other kind of substance can pass unhindered through the lower, denser kind of substance, just as every ethereal substance can pass through the coarse substance of a different kind.
 
It is different with those souls who also have to make amends for some injustice they have committed. The fact itself is a matter in itself. It can be resolved the moment the perpetrator obtains full, sincere forgiveness from the party concerned. What binds a human soul more severely, however, is the urge, or the inclination, which forms the driving force behind an act or several acts. This inclination lives on in the human soul, even after the passing over, after the detachment from the gross material body. In the ethereal body it will immediately become even more pronounced as soon as the constriction of all gross matter is removed, as the intuitions then appear much more vivid and unreserved. Such an inclination is also decisive for the density and thus heaviness of the ethereal body. The consequence of this is that the ethereal body, after being released from the gross material body, immediately sinks into the region which corresponds exactly to its heaviness and therefore to the same density. There it will also find all those who pay homage to the same inclination. Through their emanations his own will be nourished and increased, and he will then literally race in the exercise of this inclination. Likewise, of course, the others who are there with him. It is not difficult to understand that such unrestrained exuberance must be a torture for those around him. However, as this is only ever mutual in such regions, each individual will suffer bitterly from the others, everything that he in turn long-lastingly searches for to inflict on the others himself. So life there becomes a living hell until such a human soul gradually becomes weary and intuitively disgusted. Then, after a long time, the wish to get out of this kind of life will gradually awaken. The wish and disgust is the beginning of recovery. It will intensify into a cry for help and finally into prayer. Only then can it be offered a hand to ascend, which often takes decades and centuries, sometimes even longer. The inclination in a human soul is therefore the more difficult to overcome.
 
What follows from this is that, a thoughtless deed is much easier and much quicker to be redeemed than an inclination dormant in a person, regardless of whether it has become a deed or not!

A person who harbours an impure inclination without ever turning it into a deed because the earthly conditions are favourable to him will therefore have to atone more severely than a person who has thoughtlessly committed one or more deeds without having any evil intention. The rash act can be forgiven immediately without developing evil karma, but the inclination can only be forgiven when it has been completely extinguished in this is the human being. And there are many kinds. Be it greed and its cousin avarice, be it filthy sensuality, the urge to steal or murder, arson or even just overreaching and careless negligence, no matter; such an inclination will always sink or draw the person concerned to where his equals are. There is no point in reproducing life pictures of them. They are often so terrible that a human spirit on earth can hardly believe in such realities without seeing them. And even then he would still think that they must only be the figments of grossly inflamed feverish fantasies. He may therefore be content to feel a moral awe of all such things, which frees him from the bonds of all that is base, so that no inhibition stands in the way of his ascent to the Light.
 
Such are the dark regions as effects of the principle that Lucifer searches for to introduce. The eternal cycle of Creation rolls and comes to the point where decomposition begins, in which everything of matter loses its form in order to decay into primordial seed, and thus in rolling on brings new mixture, new forms with fresh force and virgin soil. That which has not yet been able to detach itself from the gross and ethereal materiality in order to enter Spiritual Essentiality over the highest, finest and lightest boundary, leaving all World of Matter behind, will inevitably be drawn into decomposition, whereby its form and the personal aspects of it will also be destroyed. This is eternal damnation, the extinction of all that is consciously personal!