Rays from the Rose Cross Magazine
Studies in the Cosmo-Conception
The First Heaven
Q. What is the state of children in the First Heaven?
A. The children lead a particularly beautiful life there.
If we could but see them we would quickly cease our grief.
Q. Does a child go to Purgatory?
A. When a child dies before the birth of the desire body, which
takes place about the fourteenth year, it does not go any higher
than the First Heaven, because it is not responsible for its actions.
Therefore the child has no purgatorial existence.
Q. What becomes of the child's desire body?
A. That which is not quickened cannot die, hence the desire body of a child,
together with the mind, will persist until a new birth, and for
that reason such children are very apt to remember their immediately
preceding life.
Q. How long do children remain in heaven?
A. For such children the First Heaven is a waiting-place where they
dwell from one to twenty years, until an opportunity for a new
birth is offered. Yet it is more than simply a waiting-place, because
there is much progress made during the interim.
Q. Who takes care of these children?
A. When a child dies there is always some relative awaiting it, or,
failing that, there are people who loved to "mother"children
in Earth life, who find delight in taking care of a little waif.
Q. Is their life there all play?
A. No, not entirely. The extreme plasticity of the desire-stuff
makes it easy to form the most exquisite living toys for the
children and their life is one beautiful play; nevertheless their
instruction is not neglected.
Q. How is this instruction carried out?
A. They are formed into classes according to their temperaments but quite
regardless of age. In the Desire World it is easy to give object-lessons
on the influence of good and evil passions, conduct and happiness.
Q. How permanent are the impressions these make?
A. These lessons are indelibly imprinted upon the child's sensitive and
emotional desire body and remain with it after rebirth so that many a
one living a noble life owes much of it to the fact that he was given
this training.
Q. When is such training especially valuable?
A. Often when a weak Spirit is born, the Compassionate Ones
(the invisible Leaders who guide our evolution) cause it to die in
early life that it may have this extra training to fit it for what may
be perhaps a hard life.
Q. What might cause such weakness?
A. This seems to be the case particularly where the etching on the desire
body was weak in consequence of a dying person's having been disturbed
by the lamentations of his relatives or because he met death by accident
or on the battlefield.
--Ref: Cosmo, 117-118
--Rays from the Rose Cross Magazine, Septemeber, 1980