Shim-big, the first of these planes, is a slow stream flowing through an inexpressibly oppressive world enclosed under a high vault. It is hard to tell what the source of its drab, colorless half-light is. A drizzle sprinkles on the stream, raising tiny bubbles on its surface. It is no longer the covering of the souls being tormented there but the souls themselves, in their decomposed ether bodies, that resemble wispy brown rags. They stumble back and forth, grabbing hold of whatever they can to keep from falling into the stream. It is not only fear that torments them. They are afflicted even more by a feeling of shame of unsurpassed intensity and by a desperate longing for their real body and for the soft, warm world-memories of the joys of life on Earth.
The feeling of pity also intensifies there.
In the meantime, the mouth of the stream can be seen up ahead. The stream itself, and the entire tunnel-shaped world, breaks off just as a subway tunnel breaks off where a trestle begins. But the water does not fall anywhere: the water and the banks and the vault-everything-dissolves into a grey, featureless void. Nobody can exist there, and there is not even a hint of any kind of ground or atmosphere. Only one thing does not disappear there: the spark of self-consciousness. In that purgatory, Drornn, the soul experiences the terrifying illusion of non-existence.
In Shim-big, atonement is done by those who were responsible for a few human deaths (even the deaths of criminals), whether by passing death sentences or by denouncing someone to the authorities. In Dromn can be found those whose violation of the Law would seem, in our view, incomparably lesser. The arithmetic of karma is strange indeed! What draws one down to Dromn is not heinous crimes or bloodshed but only the karmic consequences of a zealous atheism, an aggressive repudiation of spirituality, the active promotion of the false idea of the soul's mortality. The secret behind that surprising and seemingly disproportionate punishment is that those acts of will corked tight, as it were, the breathing holes of the soul while it was still in Enrof, resulting in an even greater encumbering of the ether essence than occurs even as the result of individual crimes taken separately. To prisoners of Dromn, it appears that nothing exists anywhere, that they themselves do not exist-just as they imagined it during their lives. Only after tremendous efforts taking up no brief span of time are they able to come to grips with the astonishing fact that, contrary to all reason and common sense, their conscious self does not disappear even there, in the void.
In so doing, they begin to understand, vaguely at first, that it could all have been very different if they had not chosen that nonexistence, or semi- nonexistence, themselves.
But the misery of self-inflicted aloneness that colors their stay in Dromn begins to give way, little by little, to alarm. The self feels as if it is being drawn somewhere down and to the side and as if it is turning from a dot into an elongated body pointed downward. The absence of any points of reference prevents it from knowing whether it is falling slowly or descending at a rapid speed. The only orientation it has is an inner voice, which howls louder than any logical thought, that it is moving neither up nor horizontally, but down.
Down below, an area of pink comes into view. For several seconds the color may even appear inviting. But then a blood-chilling guess takes hold of the unfortunate self: it realizes that it is falling helplessly into a calm sea of molten iron. It gains in weight, and it hits the molten-red surface of Fukabirn, the last plane in the sakwala of purgatories, and plunges deep down into it.
Besides the burning sensation, the torment consists of a feeling of horror at descending into eternal torture, a descent that rings of finality.
Commencing after Fukabirn is the sakwala of transphysical magma. These circumscribed worlds coexist in three-dimensional space, though in different time streams, with belts of molten rock within the planet's crust. I would like to repeat and stress that in all the metacultures, except the Indian, the suffering in those worlds was without end until Jesus Christ carried out His liberating descent into them, which in Church tradition is called the descent of the Savior into the dead. From that moment on, it became possible, though only at the cost of tremendous efforts, for the forces of Light to extricate sufferers from those abysses after the period of time necessary for them to unravel the knots of their personal karma.
The first of the magmas is Okrus, the muddy bottom of Fukabirn.
As far back as in Dromn, the shelt had been left without any of its old coatings and a new bodily essence had begun to form. Its formation nears completion in Okrus, but there is nothing even remotely human in its appearance. It is a spherical object of animate inframetal.
Who are the torments of Fukabirn and Okrus for? There are actually few such sufferers. Millions suffered in Skrivous and Ladref, but hundreds, perhaps only dozens, suffer here. The condemnation of ideological enemies to horrible tortures, the condemnation of the innocent, the torment of the defenseless, the torture of children-that is what is expiated through suffering in Okrus and Fukabirn.
There, the tormented remember well the religious teachings and the warnings they were given on Earth. They are sensible of bodily pain as retribution but have already begun to recognize the dual nature of the Law and the demonic, not Divine, responsibility for its harshness. Their consciousness begins to waken. That is the Providential side of the Law, the ancient basis for it that was established by the demiurges back before Gagtungr's invasion of Shadanakar. The wakening of consciousness, the wakening of conscience, and the growth of spiritual thirst are those aspects of the Law of Retribution that the forces of Light did not cede to the dark forces and thanks to which the Law, despite everything, has not become an absolute evil.
In its infraphysical state, the magma is very similar to its physical counterpart. Prisoners there at first retain their freedom of movement, but there is as yet no need to make efforts to sustain their existence. They absorb energy from their surroundings automatically. The same is true of Gvegr, the second belt of magma, a motionless lava sea.
I would, however, like to remind the reader that suffering of any kind in Enrof alleviates torments in the afterlife, primarily by reducing their time span, but sometimes also through a change in their «quality.» On the whole, the length of a soul's expiatory punishments after death is determined by the number of the victims that suffered from its actions in Enrof. Mass crimes result in descent to a lower plane of retribution. For example, Urkarvire can take the place of Okrus, or Propulk can take the place of Gvegr. For the bodily suffering that began in Fukabirn and increased in Okrus and Gvegr reaches its zenith on the next plane, the seething magma of Urkarvire. There, the corrupters of lofty and enlightened ideas, who bear the blame for warping the transphysical paths of thousands and millions, do atonement. Urkarvire likewise harbors those who are guilty of those heinous deeds known, in our dry, lifeless language, as conscious sadism-that is, not only did the criminals experience a feeling of pleasure from causing others suffering but they were fully aware of the immorality of the pleasure at the time. They were aware, but that did not prevent them from enjoying it, nor from indulging in it time and again.
Fortunately, time flows much more quickly there. For example, a world famous writer of modern times, who was not guilty of conscious sadism, of course, but of corrupting ideals, of perverting ideas and poisoning a great many minds with lies, had the impression that he had spent only a few days there, and not the ten years it was in Enrof time.
Next comes the hard magma of Propulk, the world of expiatory suffering for mass butchers, the instigators of bloody wars, and the torturers of entire peoples. All freedom of movement is lost. Their bodies feel as if they were lodged in a hard substance and pressed from all sides. But even this horrible bodily suffering is surpassed by the suffering of the soul. They feel a stinging remorse and longing for God that is impossible on any of the planes above it. Fortunately, few descend to Propulk. Need I say that Yezhov or Beria's cohorts are there? Amazingly, only a short while ago, Malyuta Skuratov was still suffering there. In the Propulk of the Western metacultures, not only Robespierre and Saint-Just but even some of the sixteenth-century inquisitors were still unraveling their karma.