How do you learn the lesson of right and wrong?

You are your own absolute lawgiver—the dispenser of glory—or gloom—to yourself—the decreer of your life—your reward—your punishment.

And this is true—not only in earth life—but also doubly-true of the life of the soul on the astral plane.

For each disembodied soul carries with it its own heaven—or hell—of its own creation and favourite belief—

And partakes of the blessings or sorrows of each, according to its merits.

But the judge who sentences it to reward or punishment is not a power outside of itself, but a power within—

In short—

Its own conscience.

On the astral, the conscience of the soul asserts itself very forcibly, and the still, quiet voice that was perhaps smothered during earth life, now speaks in trumpetlike tones—

And the soul hears and obeys.

Your own conscience—when allowed to speak clearly and forcibly—is the severest judge that exists.

Stripping aside all self-deception and hypocrisy, conscious or unconscious, it causes the soul to stand forth naked and bare to its own spiritual gaze.

And the soul—speaking, as its own conscience—sentences itself, in accordance with its own conceptions of right and wrong, and accepts its fate, as merited and just.

You can fly from the judgment of others, but you can never escape from your own conscience on the astral. 

You find yourself unable to escape from the judgment seat of conscience, and you lead yourself away to your reward or punishment.

Such is the poetic justice of nature, which far exceeds any conception of mortal man in his religious speculations.

And note the absolute equity and justice of it all.

You are judged, according to the highest standards of your own soul, which represents the standards of your time and environment.

The best in yourself—the highest of which you are capable—judges, and passes upon all in you below that standard.

In short, it may truthfully be said that the nature of the appropriate discipline in each individual case is well-expressed by the ideal of heaven and hell entertained by the individual in earth life, and which idea remains with the soul after it has passed from the body to the astral.

The result of this is that what the highest reason conceives, as absolute justice, is meted out by the soul to itself.

The mind of certain individuals is fully satisfied with the ideals of a lake of brimstone for sinners, and the pleasant abode in a golden-streeted heaven, with accompaniments of harp and crown for the blessed.

Others, far advanced beyond this stage, having left behind them the old ideas of a heaven in space and a hell of torment, think that the greatest happiness possible for themselves would be a state or condition in which they could see their ideals made real—their highest aims realised—their dreams come true—and their greatest punishment—a condition in which they could follow up to its logical result, the evil they have done.

And both of these classes of souls find on the astral, the heavens and hells of which they have thought, for both have created their heaven or hell from the material of their own inner consciousness.

And such mental conceptions lack nothing of reality to those who are conscious of them—the joy and suffering lose nothing of effect by reason of the absence of the physical body.

On the astral, the sinner who believes in a hell of brimstone and flames, which awaits him by reason of the foul crimes done in his days of nature, is not disappointed. 

His beliefs supply the necessary environment, and his conscience condemns him to the punishment in which he believes.

Even if he has sought to disbelieve these things by the use of his reason, and still retains the subconscious memories of his childhood teachings, or the traditions of his race, he will find himself in the same condition. 

He will undergo the traditional tortures and suffering—all in his imagination—until he receives a valuable disciplinary lesson—the dim memories of which will haunt him in the next incarnation.

There are many other degrees and grades of hells carried over to the astral by souls of various shades of religious belief.

Each has the punishment, which is best adapted to exert a deterring influence and effect over him in his next life.

The same is true of the ideal of heaven; the soul finds itself enjoying the bliss of the blessed, according to its own ideals, for the good deeds and acts it has to its credit in the infallible books of its memory.

Inasmuch, as no soul has been altogether bad, nor none absolutely good, it follows that each soul has a taste both of reward and punishment, according to its merits, as determined by its awakened conscience.

Or—stating it in another way—the conscience strikes an average for it, which average likewise agrees in detail with the prevailing belief of the soul.

Those who in earth life have deliberately brought themselves to the conviction that there is no hereafter for the soul have a peculiar experience.

They meet with their kind on a plane in which they imagine that they have been transplanted to another planet, and are still in the flesh.

And there, they are made participants in a great drama of Karma, being made to suffer for the miseries, which they have wrought upon others, and to enjoy blessings, which they have bestowed upon others.

They are not punished for their unbelief—that would be unthinkable injustice—but they learn the lesson of right and wrong in their own way. 

This experience likewise is purely mental, and arises merely from the expression in astral manifestation of the memories of their earth life, urged on by the awakened conscience, which gives them an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth, with a vengeance.

Belief or disbelief in a future state does not alter the cosmic law of compensation and astral purgation.

The laws of Karma cannot be defeated by a refusal to believe in a hereafter—nor a refusal to admit the distinction between right and wrong.

Every human being has—deep down under the surface though it may be—an intuitive realisation of the survival of the soul—and every individual has a deep-seated consciousness of some sort of a moral code.

And these subconscious beliefs and opinions come to the surface on the astral.

Those advanced souls who have given the best and highest reports of the life of the soul on the other side agree that the highest bliss and the deepest sorrow of the disembodied soul of intelligence and culture come in one case from perceiving the effect of the good actions and thoughts of its earth life, and, in the other case, from a similar perception of the results of the evil thoughts and actions of its earth life.

When the eyes of the soul are cleared—so that they may discern the tangled fabric of cause and effect—and follow up each particular thread of its own insertion therein, it has in itself a heaven and a hell of greater intensity than anything of which Dante ever dreamed.

There is no joy of the disembodied soul comparable to that experienced from perceiving the logical results of right action, and no sorrow equal to that of perceiving the result of evil action, with its sickening thought of it might have been otherwise.

But even these things pass away from the soul.

In fact, they often occupy but a moment of time, which seems to the soul as an eternity.

There is no such thing as eternal bliss or eternal pain on the astral.

These things pass away, and the soul emerges once more in earth life—to once more enrol itself in the school of life, the kindergarten of God—there to learn, and relearn, its lessons.

And remember always that both the heaven and the hell of each and every soul abides in that soul itself.

Each soul creates its own heaven and hell—for neither have any objective existence. 

The heaven and hell of each soul is the result of its Karma, and is purely a mental creation of its own being.

But the phenomena are nonetheless real to the soul, for this reason.

There is nothing in its earth life, which ever seemed more real to it.

And again, remember that heaven and hell on the astral are not given, as bribe, or punishment, but merely, as a natural means of developing and unfolding the higher qualities, and restraining the lower

But life on the astral does not consist entirely of heaven and hell.

There are joys experienced, which have nothing to do with the good or evil deeds of earth life, but which arise from the urge to express your own creative faculties, and to exercise the intellect, with increased power—the joys of expression and knowledge beyond which you cannot hope to experience.

Yogi Ramacharaka, Life Beyond Death, 1912, Yogi Publication Society, Chicago, Illinois