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The Rosicrucian Mysteries by Max Heindel

V. LIFE AND DEATH

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We have all been here many times and in different families, we have had relations of varying nature with many different people and usually there are several families among whom we may seek re-embodiment to work out our self-generated destiny and reap what we have sown in former life. If there are no special reasons why we should take birth in any particular family among certain friends or foes, the spirit is allowed to choose its own place of birth. Thus it may be said that most of us are in our present places by our own prenatal choice.

In order to assist us in making that choice the Recording Angels call up before the spirit’s vision a panorama in general outlines of each of the offered lives. This panorama will show what part of our past debts we are to pay, and what fruits we may be expected to reap in the coming life.

The spirit is left free to choose between the several lives offered. But once a choice has been made no evasion is possible during life. We have free will with regard to the future, but the past “_mature_” destiny we cannot escape, as shown by the incident recorded in _The Rosicrucian Cosmo Conception_, where the writer warned a well known Los Angeles lecturer that if he left his home upon a certain day, he would be injured by a conveyance, in head, neck, breast and shoulders. The gentleman believed and intended to heed our warning. Nevertheless he went to Sierra Madre to lecture upon the fateful day. He was injured in the places stated by a collision and later explained: “I thought the twenty-eighth was the twenty-ninth.”

When the spirit has made its choice, it descends into the second heaven where it is instructed by the Angels and Archangels how to build an archetype of the body which it will later inhabit upon earth. Also here we note the operation of the great law of justice which decrees that we reap what we sow. If our tastes are coarse and sensual, we shall build an archetype which will express these qualities; if we are refined and of aesthetic taste, we shall build an archetype correspondingly refined, but no one can obtain a better body than he can build. Then, as the architect who builds a house in which he afterwards lives, will suffer discomfort if he neglects to properly ventilate it, so also the spirit feels disease in a poorly constructed body, and as the architect learns to avoid mistakes and remedy the short-comings of one house when building another, so also the spirit which suffers from defects in its body, learns in time to build better and better vehicles.

In the Region of Concrete Thought, the spirit also draws to itself materials for a new mind. As a magnet draws iron filings but leaves other substances alone, so also each spirit draws only the kind of mind-stuff which it used in its former life, plus that which it has learned to use in its present post-mortem state. Then it descends into the Desire World where it gathers material for a new desire body such as will express appropriately its moral characteristics, and later it attracts a certain amount of ether which is built into the mold of the archetype constructed in the second heaven and acts as cement between the solids, liquids and gaseous material from the bodies of parents which forms the dense physical body of a child, and in due time the latter is brought to birth.

_Birth and Child Life._

It must not be imagined, however, that when the little body of a child has been born, the process of birth is completed. The dense physical body has had the longest evolution, and as a shoemaker who has worked at his trade for a number of years is more expert than an apprentice and can make better shoes and _quicker_, so also the spirit which has built many physical bodies produces them quickly, but the vital body is a later acquisition of the human being. Therefore we are not so expert in building that vehicle. Consequently it takes longer to construct that from the materials not used up in making the lining of the archetype, and the vital body is not born until the seventh year. Then the period of rapid growth commences. The desire body is a still later addition of composite man, and is not brought to birth until the fourteenth year when the desire nature expresses itself most strongly during so-called “hot” youth, and the mind, which makes man man, does not come to birth until the twenty-first year. In law that age is recognized as the earliest time he is fitted to exercise a franchise.

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