How are souls judged in the underworld?

You are in the dim lurid light of the underworld surrounded by horrible elemental shapes or creatures of the most loathsome aspect who are attacking you fiercely. 

You have lost all sense of time, but this seems to have been going on for what seems an eternity.

It is only the very worst specimens of humanity that have anything to do with this dreadful region after death—human characters are often complicated in their constitution. A human may have a great deal of good in his nature blemished by some abominable characteristics, and one above all is calculated to give the person so affected a period of suffering on the second sub-level.

The most beautiful human emotion is love—the behaviour in life, which that emotion prompts is benevolence, kindness to others, sympathy, and all the varieties of that characteristic.

When the love principle is missing from the nature, the result may be callous indifference to suffering in others, sometimes leading to acts of positive cruelty. Then just as active love is a force, leading to blissful conditions of astral existence, active cruelty leads to a glimpse of—or a more protracted sojourn on the terrible second sublevel.

The wild caricature of these regions embodied in ecclesiastical theology assumes that hell is governed by the devil who takes a delight in torturing his victims. This is so grotesque a perversion of the truth that one cannot easily understand how even the moderate intelligence guiding ecclesiastical thought can have been content with the theory.

Clearly, if there is a region of existence designed to be a region of suffering where suffering has a purifying purpose, that region must be ruled by Divine will, not by any diabolical agency revelling in cruelty for its own sake.

In reality, the regions of suffering are confided to the rule of a Being of infinite sublimity, goodness, mercy and love.

They constitute the mighty reformatory of the world, and the Being who rules them is spoken of by the great masters of wisdom themselves with deep reverence and admiration.

For the stupendous duty in question would never have been imposed by Divine will on any being qualified to undertake it.

Its acceptance was a voluntary act of the most unparalleled self-sacrifice.

He who undertook it is known in the occult world as Melan.

He belongs to an order of superadepts spoken of by those who still use the beautiful old term brothers for the Masters of the White Lodge as the fathers.

Besides the two submerged levels, the third, immediately in contact with the earth's surface is included in Melan's realm. The lower of the two submerged levels is hardly connected with human experience. It is chiefly a region of strange elemental life of a kind that we should regard as horrible if we had any contact with it. It is, of course, extremely varied in its aspects. Its worst conditions are very dark and wretched.

I use the word worst in preference to lowest because the lowest in the spatial sense is that part immediately in touch with the physical earth's surface, and people who cannot get away from the physical surroundings to which they have been used in life are uncomfortable certainly, but not so badly off as others also entangled with the conditions of level number three.