104 ROSICRUCIANCOSMO-CONCEPTION
people to die who were taken out of their bodies by accident
while at the height of their physical health and strength,
engaged in numerous ways in the activities of physical life;
held by the ties of wife, family, relatives, friends, pursuits of
business and pleasure.
The suicide, who tries to get away from life, only to find
that he is as much alive as ever, is in the most pit iable plight.
He is able to watch those whom he has, perhaps, disgraced
by his act, and worst of all, he has an unspeakable feeling of
being “hollowed out.” The part in the ovoid aura where the
dense body used to be is empty and although the desire body
has taken the form of the discarded dense body, it feels like
an empty shell, because the creative archetype of the body in
the Region of Concrete Thought persists as an empty mold,
so to speak, as long as the dense body should properly have
lived. When a person meets a natural death, even in the
prime of life, the activity of the archetype ceases, and the
desire body adjusts itself so as to occupy the whole of the
form, but in the case of suicide that awful feeling of
“emptiness” remains until the time comes when, in the
natural course of events, his death would have occurred.
As long as the man entertains the desires connected with
earth life he must stay in his desire body and as the progress
of the individual requires that he pass on to higher Regions,
the existence in the Desire World must necessarily become
purgative, tending to purify him from his binding desires.
How this is done is best seen by taking some radical
instances.
The miser who loved his gold in earth life loves it just as
dearly after death; but in the first place he cannot acquire
any more, because he no longer has a dense body wherewith
to grasp it and worst of all, he cannot even keep what he