What is the status of the dead?

The future is not all one pleasant state of beatitude where each one finds exactly what he likes best just ready for him when he arrives here. 

Many do pass on into happiness unalloyed and far greater than their finite minds could imagine or comprehend, but these may be considered the exceptions. 

Generally, man has left so much work undone in your sphere that he is not prepared to pass on at once to these higher courts. The place would be distasteful to him, the light and glory distressing, and he would rather shrink away than remain.

There is a law in the heavens that compels this. 

Where he has progressed to, there he must remain until his aspirations draw him up little by little. If then the comparatively good and moral man finds it so difficult to ascend into higher spheres, how must it be with the low and debased, the drunkard, the sensualist, the miser? 

Would they be happy at all, do you think? 

Their occupations taken from them, their bodies lost and replaced by others whose particles they cannot collect together, rolling in darkness, incapable of anything, sometimes not even of thought, while with others the thoughts are their most acute scourge—everyone having his own punishment as he has wrought it out for himself on your earth plane!

This is the law that governs these things. You make your own heaven or your own hell.

The sins you indulge in produce such and such effects on your spirit body—in some, preventing its development at all, so that the poor soul when separated from its earthly tenement wanders, not knowing whither, and ages and ages may be necessary to perfect that which might have been so easily formed in beautiful proportions here. 

No man sinks lower than the sensualist. 

He has so debased the beautiful covering Nature has endowed him with, so contaminated it by the vilest usages, that it is quite impossible any spiritual formation can be going on while he is living such a life, and it is most frequently such characters who find it the hardest to collect themselves and rise in the next sphere. But it is difficult for all who have done wickedly in any way, and even for those who have done no positive wrong, but having the means of doing good and relieving suffering humanity, neglected to do it, to make much progress at first so difficult, that higher spirits have taken the work in hand and are striving to reach and help the undeveloped.

―P. In Spirit