In the lower region of purgatory
Purgatory is not a Biblical concept. According to the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church, where all the dead believers, but who have not come to perfection, are subjected to cleansing sufferings. They stay there until they atone for the punishment for their sins.
Let us consider one of the lower regions of purgatory in order to at least give a little idea of the conditions that a person, thanks to his addictions and desires during his earthly life, can prepare for his transitional state.
If the base passions were in vigorous activity, some of the coarsest particles of astral matter will be charged with life force, and their very number will be comparatively large. Such a law is effective in all areas of purgatory, and therefore a person, even during his lifetime, can absolutely definitely know what his future will be immediately after death.
The first or lower region of purgatory contains conditions that are described in many Hindu and Buddhist scriptures under the names of "hells" of various kinds.
One should know that a person passing into one of these states cannot be freed from attachments and bad desires that have attracted him here; they will be preserved - as part of his character - latent in his soul, remaining in a state of vegetation until the time comes for them to manifest again; such a time will come when a new "desire body" begins to form for the next incarnation of the same person in the physical world.
The presence of a person in the first area of purgatory depends on the presence in his “desire body” (Kama-Rupa) of matter that belongs to this area, and he will remain a prisoner in it until most of such matter falls off him, until the “shell” decomposed to such an extent as to allow the person to come into contact with the subsequent higher region.
The atmosphere of this lower region is gloomy, heavy, sad and overwhelming to an incredible degree. It seems to be overflowing with vapors of various evil manifestations hostile to good, and so it really is. Such heavy vibrations were created by people, they were drawn to this gloomy place by their evil addictions. All desires and feelings that can cause shudder find material here for their expression. It is actually the darkest of the slums with all its horrors, hidden from physical sight and paraded here in all its naked abomination. Its repulsive appearance is further enhanced by the fact that in the astral world, the inner character is expressed in an external way, and a person full of vile passions personifies them with his entire external form.
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A brutal appetite shapes the astral body in bestial form, and the repulsive human-animal forms are suitable shells for hardened human souls. In the Astral Worlds, it is impossible to be a hypocrite and clothe dirty thoughts in the cloak of apparent virtue. As a person is in reality, such will be his outward appearance: he either shines with beauty, if his soul is noble, or repels with his ugliness, if his nature was impure. That is why it becomes clear that teachers like Buddha, whose inner vision the whole world was open, could describe with such vivid colors all the disgusting ghosts and pictures that such an act is teeming with.
In our time, people treat such images with distrust only for the reason that they do not know to what extent, after being released from heavy physical matter that does not have plasticity, all souls appear in their true likeness, in an unmasked real form. Even if in the physical world the face of a corrupted and drunken scoundrel takes on the most repulsive expression - all the more so where plastic astral matter takes on a definite form with the least vibration of base desire - a person will inevitably manifest in a terrible form, changing into the most varied shades of ugliness. For one must not forget that the inhabitants of this lower region are the scum of humanity, murderers, robbers, cruel criminals of various types, drunkards, libertines … There is no one here except those guilty of atrocious crimes or deliberate stubborn cruelty,or possessed by some kind of nasty lust.
The only individuals who do not belong to this low type who can be detained here for some time are suicides, people who wanted to avoid earthly punishment by suicide for their crimes, which only aggravated their situation with such a replacement. But not all suicides end up here, because suicides are committed under the influence of a variety of motives, and only those who killed themselves stay here in order to get rid of the consequences of the crimes committed.
Here, in this dark region, each person is the direct creator of his own calamities. Unchanged in anything, except for the loss of their physical body, people here flaunt their passions in all their nakedness; and, overflowing with fierce, unquenched aspirations, seething with revenge and hatred, thirsting for physical pleasures, which, having lost their physical body, they can no longer enjoy, they prowl, furious and greedy, in this gloomy region, crowding around all the dirty earthly dens, around brothels and taverns, pushing their regulars to shameful deeds and to violence, possessing them in order to involve them in all sorts of excesses. The sickening atmosphere that spreads around such places comes mainly from these astral entities attached to the earthly plane, evaporating vile passions and impure desires.
Mediums, with the exception of very pure and noble characters, are often the objects of their attack, and very often the weakest of them, weakened by the even more passive provision of their body for the temporary stay of other disembodied souls in it, are possessed by these entities, as a result of this, intemperance and madness. Executed murderers, raging with horrors and a terrible thirst for revenge, reliving again and again their crime and all its terrible consequences, surround themselves with an atmosphere of frightening thought images and, attracted to a person who bears vengeful, evil intentions within himself, they push him to the real doing what he is internally focused on.
Sometimes there you can meet a person who is continuously pursued by his murdered victim, unable to get rid of it, despite all the efforts to escape from the terrible pursuer, with stubborn persistence everywhere overtaking him. The killed, unless he himself is of the lowest human types, arrives in a state of unconsciousness, and it is this unconsciousness that gives particular horror to his purely mechanical pursuit of the murderer.
There is also the "hell" of the vivisector, because cruelty attracts the heaviest materials and the most evil compositions of astral matter into the astral body of a person, and the vivisector lives here among the images of his numerous victims crowding around him, groaning, trembling, howling in pain. They are revived, not by the animal soul, but by those vibrations of the passions, which, the stronger they were, the longer they continue to live after physical death in the astral body of the animal; these vibrations, pulsating with hatred of the torturer, repeat with automatic correctness his most painful experiences, thanks to the force of the last experiences that ended the life of the tortured creature on earth.
There is no arbitrary punishment that is assigned from the outside, only the inevitable realizations of the causes created by a person during his life in the physical world. If in earthly life he succumbed to bad impulses, and consequently attracted to himself and introduced into his astral body coarse matters, which alone are able to vibrate in response to base impulses, he thereby inexorably created a prison for his soul, and this prison must be destroyed so that his soul can be freed. Just as inevitably as a drunkard must live in his repulsive and poisonous body here on the earthly plane, so he must live in his even more repulsive astral body there. What goes around comes around. This is the law of all worlds, and it cannot be avoided.
It should also be noted that the astral body there is not at all worse than it was during the earthly life of a person, when he created an atmosphere around him, saturated with bad astral currents; man only does not notice this outrage, since in earthly life he is astrally blind. In addition, we can console ourselves with the thought of these unfortunate brothers of ours and with the fact that their suffering is only temporary and represents a necessary lesson for their souls.
Strongly violating the laws of nature, they learn with the same force to know these laws and the inevitability of those calamities that arise from neglect of them. A lesson that they did not want to learn during their life on earth, caught up in the whirlpool of their own lusts and desires, is given to them here and will be given in future lives until evil is uprooted and a person rises for a better life. The lessons of nature are strict, but in the end they are also merciful, because they lead to the evolution of the soul and guide it towards the attainment of immortality.
Annie Besant