When a man is dangerous he should of course be restrained, but even apart from the question of the moral right of a community to take the life of anyone—which we deny—society by its very act of retaliatory murder defeats the very end it would serve, for if the vicious murderer is restrained under whatever discipline is necessary in a prison for a number of years until his natural death, he will have forgotten his bitterness against his victim and against society, and when he stands as a free spirit in the Desire World, he may even by prayer have obtained forgiveness and have become a good Christian. He will then go on his way rejoicing, and will in the future life seek to help those whom he hurt here.
When society retaliates and puts him to a violent death shortly after he has committed [pg 165] the crime, he is most likely to feel himself as having been greatly injured, and not without cause. Then such a character will usually seek to “get even” as he calls it, he will go about for a long time inciting others to commit murder and other crimes. Then we have an epidemic of murders in a community, a condition not infrequent.
The regicide in Servia shocked the Western World by wiping out an entire royal house in a most shockingly bloody manner, and the Minister of the Interior was one of the chief conspirators. Later he wrote his memoirs, and therein he writes that whenever the conspirators had tried to win anyone as a recruit, they always succeeded when they burned incense. He did not know why, but simply mentioned it as a curious coincidence. To the mystic investigator the matter is perfectly clear. We have shown the necessity of having a vehicle made of the materials of any world wherein we wish to function. We usually obtain a physical vehicle by going through the womb, or perhaps in a few special cases from a particularly good materializing medium, but where it is only necessary to work upon the brain and influence someone else to act, we need but a vehicle [pg 166] made of such ether as may be obtained from fumes of many different substances. Each kind attracts different classes of spirits, and there is no doubt that the incense burned at meetings where the conspirators were successful was of a low and sensual order and attracted spirits who had a grudge against humanity in general and the King of Servia in particular. These malcontents were unable to injure the King himself, but used a subtle influence which helped the conspirators in their work. The released murderer who has a grudge against society on account of his execution, may enter low gambling saloons where the fumes of liquor and tobacco furnish ample opportunity for working upon the class of people who congregate in such places, and the man whose spiritual sight has been developed is often sadly impressed when he sees the subtle influences to which those who frequent such places are exposed. It is a fact of course that a man must be of a low caliber to be influenced by low thoughts, and that it is as impossible to incite a person of benevolent character to do murder—unless we put him into a hypnotic sleep—as to make a tuning fork which vibrates to C sing by striking another attuned to the key of G, [pg 167] but the thoughts of both living and dead constantly surround us, and no man ever thought out a high spiritual philosophy under the influence of tobacco fumes or while imbibing alcoholic stimulants. Were capital punishment, newspaper notoriety of criminals, the manufacture of liquor and tobacco eliminated from society, the gun factories would soon cease to advertise and go out of business along with most of the locksmiths. The police force would decrease, so would jails and taxes would be correspondingly minimized.
When a person enters purgatory he is exactly the same person as before he died. He has just the same appetites, likes and dislikes, sympathies and antipathies, as before. There is one important difference, however, namely, that he has no dense body wherewith to gratify his appetites. The drunkard craves drink, in fact, far more than he did in this life, but has no stomach which can contain liquor and cause chemical combustion necessary to bring about the state of intoxication in which he delights. He may and does enter saloons, where he interpolates his body into the body of a physical drunkard, so that he may obtain his desires at second hand as it were, he will incite his victim to drink more [pg 168] and more. Yet there is no true satisfaction. He sees the full glass upon the counter but his spirit hand is unable to lift it. He suffers tortures of Tantalus until in time he realizes the impossibility of gratifying his base desire. Then he is free to go on so far as that vice is concerned. He has been purged from that evil without intervention of an angry deity or a conventional devil with hell's flames and pitchfork to administer punishment, but under the immutable law that as we sow so shall we reap, he has suffered exactly according to his vice. If his craving for drink was of a mild nature, he would scarcely miss the liquor which he cannot there obtain. If his desires were strong and he simply lived for drink, he would suffer veritable tortures of hell without need of actual flames. Thus the pain experienced in eradication of his vice would be exactly commensurate with the energy he had expended upon contracting the habit, as the force wherewith a falling stone strikes the earth is proportionate to the energy expended in hurling it upwards into the air.
Yet it is not the aim of God to “get even;” love is higher than law and in His wonderful mercy and solicitude for our welfare He has [pg 169] opened the way of repentance and reform whereby we may obtain forgiveness of sin, as taught by the Lord of Love: the Christ. Not indeed contrary to law, for His laws are immutable, but by application of a higher law, whereby we accomplish here that which would otherwise be delayed until death had forced the day of reckoning. The method is as follows:
In our explanation concerning the sub-conscious memory we noted that a record of every act, thought and word is transmitted by air and ether into our lungs, thence to the blood, and finally inscribed upon the tablet of the heart:—a certain little seedatom, which is thus the book of Recording Angels. It was later explained how this panorama of life is etched into the desire body and forms the basis of retribution after death. When we have committed a wrong and our conscience accuses us in consequence, and this accusation is productive of sincere repentance accompanied by reform, the picture of that wrong act will gradually fade from the record of our life, so that when we pass out at death it will not stand accusingly against us. We noted that the panorama of life unwinds backwards just after death. Later, in the purgatorial [pg 170] life it again passes before the spiritual vision of the man, who then experiences the exact feeling of those whom he has wronged. He seems to lose his own identity for the time being, and assumes the condition of his one time victim, he experiences all the mental and physical suffering himself which he inflicted upon others. Thus he learns to be merciful instead of cruel, and to do right instead of wrong in a future life. But if he awakens to a thorough realization of a wrong previous to his death, then, as said, the feeling of sorrow for his victim and the restitution or redress which he gives of his own free will, make the suffering after death unnecessary, hence—“his sin is forgiven.”
The Rosicrucian Mystery teaching gives a scientific method whereby an aspirant to higher life may purge himself continually, and thus be able to entirely avoid existence in purgatory. Each night after retiring the pupil reviews his life during the past day in reverse order. He starts to visualize as clearly as possible the scene which took place just before retiring. He then endeavors to impartially view his actions in that scene examining them to see whether he did right or wrong. If the latter, he endeavors to feel and realize as [pg 171] vividly as possible that wrong. For instance, if he spoke harshly to someone, and upon later consideration finds it was not merited, he will endeavor to feel exactly as that one felt whom he wronged and at the very earliest opportunity to apologize for the hasty expression. Then he will call up the next scene in backward succession which may perhaps be the supper table. In respect of that scene he will examine himself as to whether he ate to live, sparingly and of foods prepared without suffering to other creatures of God, (such as flesh foods that cannot be obtained without taking life). If he finds that he allowed his appetite to run away with him and that he ate gluttonously, he will endeavor to overcome these habits, for to live a clean life we must have a clean body and no one can live to his highest possibilities while making his stomach a graveyard for the decaying corpses of murdered animals. In this respect there occurs to the writer a little poem by Ella Wheeler Wilcox:
“I am the voice of the voiceless;
Through me the dumb shall speak,
Till a deaf world's ear