States of Hell | The Caverns of Slumber

States of Hell

The Caverns of Slumber

These awful caves—these terrible stupefied spirits—can any words point to a fate more fearful than theirs?

A great multitude of spirits, in a state of complete stupor and unconscious of all around them, lies in vast caverns called the Caverns of Slumber. These are individual spirits who have killed themselves through drug abuse and whose spirits have thus been deprived of all chance of development, and so have retrograded instead of advancing and growing— just as a limb tied up and deprived of motion withers away—and now they are feebler than an unborn infant and as little able to possess conscious life.

In many cases, their sleep lasts for centuries; in others, where their indulgence has been less, it might only last for twenty, fifty, or a hundred years. These spirits live, and that is all; their senses are little more developed than those of some fungus growth, which exists without a spark of intelligence—yet the soul germ lingers and is alive.

Yet the soul germ lingers and is alive.

These caverns are full of life-giving magnetism and attendant spirits—who have themselves passed through a similar state in their own earthly lives—are engaged in giving what life they can pour into those comatose spirit bodies, which lie like rows of dead people all over the floor.

By slow degrees, according to as the spirit has been more or less injured by the drug taken in earthly life, these wretched beings awake to consciousness and all the sufferings experienced when deprived of their deadly drug. By long and slow degrees, they awaken sense by sense until—like feeble-suffering children—they become fit for instruction and are sent to institutions where the dawning intellect is trained and helped to develop and recover those faculties, which have been all but destroyed in earth life.

These poor souls only learn very slowly; they have paralyzed brain and senses and have avoided—not learned—the lessons of their earthly life and its development of the spirit.

These Caves of Slumber are inexpressibly sad to behold—not less so that these wretched slumberers are unconscious for so long and awaken at last with the intellects of idiots—to grow through hundreds of years back to the possession of the mental powers of children. Their development is necessarily slow even then, for—unlike ordinary children—they have almost lost the power to grow and take many generations of time to learn what one generation on earth could have taught them.