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Word Gems 

exploring self-realization, sacred personhood, and full humanity

 

Franchezzo

He discovers a cave of slumberers, a great many bodies in stasis, those who had killed themselves with overdoses of opium.
 

 

 

return to the main-page article on "Hell" 

 

On my way back from the Frozen Land to the Land of Twilight, I passed a number of vast caverns called the "Caverns of Slumber", wherein lay a great multitude of spirits in a state of complete stupor, unconscious of all around them.

 

like a scene from the movie “Tomorrow War,”
bodies in sleep-state are discovered

 

the near hollowed-out soul husks of those who had died from drug overdoses

These, I learned, were the spirits of mortals who had killed themselves with opium eating and smoking, and whose spirits had thus been deprived of all chance of development and so had retrograded instead of advancing and growing—just as a limb tied up and deprived of motion withers away—and now they were feebler than an unborn infant, and as little able to possess conscious life.

In many cases their sleep would last for centuries, in others, where the indulgence in the drug had been less, it might only last for twenty, fifty, or a hundred years.

intelligent as vegetables

These spirits lived and that was all, their senses being little more developed than those of some fungus growth which exists without one spark of intelligence.

even so, the soul-spark within had not been extinguished

Yet in them the soul-germ still lingered, imprisoned like a tiny seed in the wrapping of some Egyptian mummy, which, long as it may lie thus, is yet alive, and will in a kindly soil sprout forth at last.

These caverns, in which kind spirit hands had laid them, were full of life-giving magnetism, and a number of attendant spirits who had themselves passed through a similar state, from opium poisoning, in their own earth lives, were engaged in giving what life they could pour into these comatose spirit bodies which lay like rows of dead people all over the floor.

By slow degrees, according as the spirit had been more or less injured by the drug taken in the earthly life, these wretched beings would awake to consciousness and all the sufferings experienced by the opium eater when deprived of his deadly drug. By long and slow degrees the poor spirits would awaken, sense by sense, till at last like feeble suffering children they would become fit for instruction, when they would be sent to institutions like your idiot asylums, where the dawning intellect would be trained and helped to develop and those faculties recovered which had been all but destroyed in the earth life.

These poor souls would only learn very slowly, because they had to try to learn now, without the aids of the earthly life, those lessons which it had been designed to teach. Like drunkards (only more completely) they had paralysed brain and senses and had avoided, not learnt, the lessons of the earthly life and its development of the spirit.

To me these caves of slumber were inexpressibly sad to behold—not less so that those wretched slumberers were unconscious for so long of the valuable time they lost in their dreamless, hopeless sleep of stagnation. Like the hare in the fable, while they slept others less swift won the race, and these poor souls might try in vain through countless ages to recover the time which they had lost.

When these slumberers shall at last awake, to what a fate do they not waken, through what an awful path must they not climb to reach again that point in the earth life from which they have fallen. Does it not fill our souls with horror to think that there are those on earth who live, and pile up wealth, through the profits made from that dreadful trade in opium, which not alone destroys the body, but would seem to destroy even more fatally the soul, till one would despondently ask if there be indeed hope for these its victims? These awful caves—these terrible stupefied spirits, —can any words point a fate more fearful than theirs?

To awaken at last with the intellects of idiots, to grow, through hundreds of years, back at last to the possession of the mental powers of children, not of grown men and women.

Slow, slow, must be their development even then, for unlike ordinary children they have almost lost the power to grow, and take many generations of time to learn what one generation on earth could have taught them.

Editor's note:

Why will many of the drug addicts find themselves sleeping for centuries? Strangely, they seem worse off than hardened criminals.

I was surprised to learn of the dire fate of the drug addicts. We can understand why the leaders of the RCC Inquisition (see the previous article) might be sent to “the slammer” for a few thousand years, but it could seem unjust that the druggees should have to sink into a vegetable state and linger there for who knows how many centuries.

For some time it had been my understanding that, upon crossing over, whatever diseases of the body there might be, whatever deformities or degenerations, one would now enjoy a new body, full of vigor and energy. While all of this remains the general rule, drug addicts seem to be in a special category of hurting themselves.

What’s going on with this? The hardened criminals might also be incarcerated for a very long time, but at least they have their wits and minds about them. But the druggees have not only lost their minds but, in large measure, have compromised their capacities which define their essential humanity. This is really bad. The druggees seem to be in worse shape than anyone I’ve ever heard about on the other side. Why is this?

I have no “chapter and verse”, no memo from “higher management” as guide, however, I’d like to offer my best judgment on this question.

On the “pay the last penny” page, we find Jesus confronting the vicious politicians of his day, the Pharisees. He speaks to them of what has been called “the unpardonable sin” principle. This refers not to an unwillingness of God to pardon, but to a deadening of one’s capacities to repent. This rubric played out differently for Jesus’ enemies, but a portion of Jesus’ message also applies to the drug addicts. 

I think it works like this. There are many purposes of life, but, as we grow to higher levels of being, what might be the most basic of all purposes is that of learning to enjoy one’s own existence. Without this ability, we will not survive what I have called “the terror of living eternally.”

In other words, learning to properly negotiate the acquisition of pleasure for one’s life is not a small matter. It’s a basic requirement for all beings designed to live forever. So, what do we have? We have the druggees who, of course, are seeking for pleasure but do so “in all the wrong places.” As they do, they appropriate, we might say, the pleasure-seeking apparatus of the mind – but in a perverted way.

Special note:

what we stay alive for

I received a letter from a reader concerning the subject of anger and how to deal with it: I offered this:

When I am angry, I’ve been trying to learn to ask myself, what am I angry about? Oftentimes, I don’t know exactly, and so I have to center myself and trace the negativity back to some source of discontent; but, whatever it is, I have learned that 100% of the time it’s related to some fear of not finding happiness. If something threatens us, and we believe that we will never find happiness, this really messes us up; but, in a calmer moment, as we analyze it, we always discover that this is not true, we can never be deprived of future happiness; however, the terror of it is always stands ready to subvert us.

This tells me that happiness, one’s search for pleasure, is vital to mental equilibrium. In some unexplained way, the opium addicts, having spent themselves, now face life, as they see it, without hope for happiness or an ability to acquire it.

When this occurs, one falls into a deep pit of despair and aimlessness that might envelope and deaden one’s spirit for centuries. There's nothing to stay alive for.

 

I have heard it said that many of the unhappy beings, when they have attained at last to the development of infants, are sent back to earth to be re-incarnated in an earthly body, that they may enjoy again the advantages they have misused before. But of this I only know by hearsay, and cannot give any opinion of my own upon its truth. I only know that I should be glad to think of any such possibility for them which could shorten the process of development or help them to regain all that they had lost.

Why not use “R” to shorten the sentences of most everyone in the Dark Realms?

Editor’s note: Franchezzo frankly admits that what he thinks he knows about reincarnation is but mere "hearsay" evidence. As we learned on the “R” page, essentially all of its reports constitute hearsay proposition, conjecture, speculation. No one has ever seen the actual event of “R”, that of being launched into a new life, a new body, a new world. No one has ever witnessed this. All we have are vague testimonies of what people want to believe. And concerning why they want to believe this, see "the 500 tape-recorded messages from the other side" writing.

Leaving this observation aside, if “R” were a real option concerning reducing time in the Dark Realms, then why not press into service this “reduction of jail time” for all denizens? There are countless millions, if not billions, of spirit-persons “doing time” in “the rat cellar” with sentences, in many cases, well in excess of 50, 100, or even, 1000 years. Where is the cry to liberate these unfortunates? Why offer plan to secure freedom for only the opium addicts?

Well, the answer is, there is no such thing as “bustin’ outta jail tonight” from the Dark Realms for anyone. No such option is available. But let us address the philosophical underpinnings concerning why such commutation of sentence has no basis in reality.

For one thing, time in the Dark Realms is not punishment but a form of education; it's not something we should want to unwarrantedly get away from but to execute conscientiously. Further, no external judging authority will send us there. We ourselves, our higher selves, render judgment, we ourselves send ourselves, and, therefore, to mitigate one’s own verdict concerning what is best for oneself would be to countermand the wisdom of one’s own sacred soul. If this sounds like working against oneself – an argument Jesus used in his debates with the Pharisees – it is, and Nature is not at odds or at war with itself.

can the human spirit be individualized, stamped with uniqueness, more than once

But there’s a more practical reason why “jumping back into the existential hopper, reconstituting oneself, and hoping for a better throw of the dice this time” is not part of the package of human evolution. Stated differently, and zeroing in on the crux of the matter, can the human spirit be individualized more than once?

What does this mean? Well, we don’t know exactly because things of the invisible spirit world are not so easy to delineate. However, my sense is this. It’s like wet cement drying. It can do this only once. We can’t melt a block of concrete down and pour it into a mold again. So it is with the human spirit. We come to this world, only once, in order to individuate, to become persons in our own right.

As we do, we take to ourselves, like the drying cement, certain settled and unique features - mental-spiritual forms and shapes, if you will - an array of particular attributes, among all persons in the universe. They only made one of each of us. And once the “cement is set,” there's no going back.

See plenary discussion of these issues in nearly 60 articles on the “R” page.

 

 

Editor's last word: