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The Rosicrucian Mysteries by Max Heindel

III. THE VISIBLE AND THE INVISIBLE WORLD

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Last year she became aroused to the importance of this branch of study as a key to self knowledge and a means of understanding the natures of others, also of developing the compassion for their errors, so necessary in the cultivation of love of one’s neighbor. Love of our neighbor the Savior enjoined upon us as the Supreme Commandment which is the fulfillment of all laws, and as Astrology teaches us to _bear_ and _forbear_, it helps as nothing else can in the development of the supreme virtue. She therefore joined one of the classes started in Los Angeles by the writer, but a sudden illness quickly ended in death and thus terminated her study of the subject in the physical body, ere it was well begun.

Upon one of many occasions when she visited the writer subsequent to her release from the body, she deplored the fact that it seemed so difficult to make headway in her study of astrology. The writer advised continued attendance at the classes, and suggested that she could surely get someone “on the other side” to help her study.

At this she exclaimed impatiently: “Oh yes! of course I attend the classes, I have done so right along; I have also found a friend who helps me here. But you cannot imagine how difficult it is to concentrate here upon mathematical calculations and the judgment of a horoscope or in fact upon any subject here, where every little thought-current takes you miles away from your study. I used to think it difficult to concentrate when I had a physical body, but it is not a circumstance to the obstacles which face the student here.”

The physical body was an anchor to her, and it is that to all of us. Being dense, it is also to a great extent impervious to disturbing influences from which the more subtle spiritual bodies do not shield us. It enables us to bring our ideas to a logical conclusion with far less effort at concentration than is necessary in that realm where all is in such incessant and turbulent motion. Thus we are gradually developing the faculty of holding our thoughts to a center by existence in this world, and we should value our opportunities here, rather than deplore the limitations which help in one direction more than they fetter in another. In fact, we should never deplore any condition, each has its lesson. If we try to learn what that lesson is and to assimilate the experience which may be extracted therefrom, we are wiser than those who waste time in vain regrets.

We said there is no time in the Desire World, and the reader will readily understand that such must be the case from the fact, already mentioned, that nothing there is opaque.

In this world the rotation of the opaque earth upon its axis is responsible for the alternating conditions of day and night. We call it Day—when the spot where we live is turned towards the sun and its rays illumine our environment, but when our home is turned away from the sun and its rays obstructed by the opaque earth we term the resulting darkness: Night. The passage of the earth in its orbit around the sun produces the seasons and the year, which are our divisions of time. But in the Desire World where all is light there is but one long day. The spirit is not there fettered by a heavy physical body, so it does not need sleep and existence is unbroken. Spiritual substances are not subject to contraction and expansion such as arise here from heat and cold, hence summer and winter are also non-existent. Thus there is nothing to differentiate one moment from another in respect of the conditions of light and darkness, summer and winter, which mark time for us. Therefore, while the so-called “dead” may have a very accurate memory of time as regards the life they lived here in the body, they are usually unable to tell anything about the chronological relation of events which have happened to them in the Desire World, and it is a very common thing to find that they do not even know how many years have elapsed since they passed out from this plane of existence. Only students of the Stellar Science are able to calculate the passage of time after their demise.