The worst that an ordinary individual usually provides for oneself after death is a useless existence, devoid of all rational interests. This is but a result of a life wasted in self-indulgence, triviality and gossip here on earth. One thus makes for oneself both one’s purgatory and one’s own heaven, and these are not places but states of consciousness. Hell does not exist, it is only a figment of the theological imagination.
Neither purgatory nor heaven can ever be eternal, for a finite cause cannot produce an infinite result. Nevertheless, the conditions of the worst type after death are perhaps best described by the word ‘hell’, though they are not everlasting. Thus, for example, it sometimes happens that a murderer is followed about by his victim, never being able to escape from his haunting presence. The victim is wrapped in unconsciousness, and this very unconsciousness seems to add a new horror to the mechanical pursuit. Such conditions are not produced arbitrarily, but are the inevitable result of causes set in operation by each individual.
Nature’s lessons are sharp, but in the long run they are merciful, for they lead to the evolution of the soul, being strictly corrective.
For most people the state after death is much happier than life upon earth. The first feeling of which the dead person is usually conscious is one of the most wonderful and delightful freedom. One has nothing to worry about, no duties rest upon one, except those which one chooses to impose on oneself. Regarded from this point of view, it is clear that there is ample justification for the assertion that people physically alive, buried and cramped as they are in physical bodies, are in the true sense far less alive than those usually termed dead.
The so-called dead are much more free and, being less hampered by material conditions, are able to work far more effectively and to cover a wider field of activity. Astral pleasures being so much greater than those of the physical world, there is danger of people being lured towards them thus hampering their progress. However, even the delights of the astral life do not present a serious danger to those who have realised a little of something higher while on the physical plane. After death one should try to pass through the astral levels as speedily as possible and not yield to their refined pleasures.
Any developed individual is in every way quite as active during astral life after death, as during one’s physical life. One can therefore help or hinder one’s own progress and that of others quite as much after death as before, and consequently one is all the time generating karma of the greatest importance.
The article has been taken from the book ‘Life Beyond Death’ by Anil Sharma
