108 ROSICRUCIANCOSMO-CONCEPTION
body at death, his past life passes b efor e him in p ictures; but
at that time he has no feeling concerning them.
During his life in the Desire World also these life
pictures roll backwards, as before; but now the man has all
the feelings that it is p ossib le for him t o have as, one by one,
the scenes pass before him. Every incident in his past life is
now lived over again. When he comes to a point where he
has injured someone, he himself feels the pain as the injured
person felt it. He lives through all the sorrow and suffering
he has caused to others and learns just how painful is the
hurt and how hard to bear is the sorrow he has caused. In
addition there is the fact already mentioned that the suffering
is much keener because he has no dense body to dull the
pain. Perhaps that is why the speed of life there is tripled—
that the suffering may lose in duration what it gains in
sharpness. Nature's measures are wonderfully just and true.
There is another characteristic peculiar to this phase of
postmortem existence which is intimately connected with
the fact (already mentioned) that distance is almost
annihilated in the Desire World. When a man dies, he at
once seems to swell out in his vital body; he appears to
himself to grow into immense proportions. This feeling is
due to the fact, not that the body really grows, but that the
perceptive faculties receive so many impressions from
various sources, all s eeming to b e clos e at hand. The same is
true of the des ir e body. The ma n seems to b e pres ent with all
the people with whom on earth he had relations of a nature
which require correction. If he has injured one man in San
Francisco and another in New York, he will feel as if part of
him were in each place. This gives him a peculiar feeling of
being cut to pieces.
The student will now understand the importance of the