f other torture to check the course of the
erring soul. And yet there is no suffering that is not self-imposed. It
is both consistent and just that a man should associate with his kind
and look upon himself in others until he grows sick of his own vileness
and cries out in agony of spirit against his own moral offenses. It must
not be assumed that every person dying with considerable matter
belonging to the lower astral level still within his emotional body will
necessarily pass through such experiences. It should never be forgotten
that we are dealing with a matter of the utmost complexity and that even
the most exhaustive description in print would present only a fragment
of the truth. The conditions of consciousness on any subplane vary as
individuals vary. Some people on the lowest astral level are wholly
unconscious of their surroundings. Another variation is that some people
find themselves floating in darkness and largely cut off from others--a
sufficiently undesirable condition, and yet better than the fate of
some. All states of astral consciousness are reactions from previous
good or evil conduct and are, moreover, temporary conditions that will
in time be left behind.

In a different way and at a higher level there may be suffering on the
astral plane that is purifying the nature. Not all offenses against
nature's laws are of so gross a type. There is the abuse of desire and
the violation of conscience that may result in various kinds of regret
and emotional distress. A desire of a refined type strongly built up
upon the physical plane lives with an intenser vitality on the astral
plane after the physical body can no longer gratify it. A glutton and a
miser have strong desires of a very different type. Each of them is
likely to suffer on account of it during the astral life. They need not
dwell upon the lowest level to get a reaction from their folly in the
physical life. We can easily imagine the distress of the glutton in a
world without food. There could be no distress because of hunger, for
the astral body is not, like the physical body, renewed and maintained
by what it consumes. But hunger and the gratification of the sense of
taste are very different things. It is the latter that would trouble the
gormand, and it is said that great suffering, as in the case of the
drunkard, is his lot until the desire gradually disappears because of
the impossibility of its gratification.

The miser represents a subtl