The Strange Story of Ahrinziman: Best Excerpts
Review: This is one of my favorites, filled with intrigue, the overcoming of intense hatred and selfishness, where the protagonist brings himself about as low in the lower realms as you can go. It is a prequel of sorts to <A Wanderer in the Spirit Lands,> also one of the finest spiritual realm accounts
ever. In this book the first half is devoted to the physical incarnation and the second half is devoted to the spirit realms after an incarnation. A true account of a man's life and how his earthly actions, lusts, desires, build the world in the astral realm (heaven or hell) in which his astral body is composed as well as perception of certain strata of the astral realm. A Persian, born of royalty, (in the times of Aladdin) gives his life story, through his death and into his afterlife in a search for justice and for his soulmate. He explains the different levels of life and death and the surrounding forces that accompany us through this process.
One intriguing thought that he inspires is that before we arrive in this life, our forbearers set our life's stage by their actions, being either good or evil. Written more like a novel, yet teaches life's lessons from the spiritual point of light.
From the Introduction: Spheres and Stars of Light And Darkness
Upon the threshold of life stand two Angels – the Angels of the Light and of the Dark Spheres and it is their task to observe into which sphere the Star of the Soul that has just been born ascends. These two Angels are represented as weaving eternally the light and dark threads to produce the
golden or the somber texture that is to prevail in the web of the Soul’s existence, the happy or sorrowful days of its life. And as a man leads a moral or an immoral life, so will he draw down to him from the light or the dark spheres good or evil, light or dark qualities with which to endow the Soul which shall be transmitted into life through him, and thus will his children be in affinity with the light or dark spheres, and so will the stars of those spheres rule or control their destinies and be the dominating influence in shaping their lives.
These two spheres of light and dark qualities exist eternally because they are the antithesis of one another, the poising scales which keep the balance of progress even and hold up each other by the equality of their power, causing between them that friction which prevents stagnation, the true death of progress, and resembling (the light and the dark, the good
and the evil) two great millstones which, grinding on eternally, free the Soul from the rough rocks of ignorance and the coarse dross of purely material desires. To the student of the Spiritual firmament these two spheres appear to revolve round two mighty stars, the star of each typifying by its color the distinction between the qualities bestowed by each while another, a third star with its spheres, seems to hover ever between them, reflecting in its rays a blending of color drawn from the higher qualities evolved from the influence of both.
In the spheres of the Star of pure unsullied light are found the dwelling places of those Souls who have been uncontaminated by any earthly sin. They have but touched upon the borders of Earth life, and so have attained conscious existence only to pass onward. They have not known Earth life save for a brief period during which
mortality has clothed their Souls, but in which their consciousness has been too slight to enable them to learn any of Earth’s lessons. They are free from sin because they have never felt temptation. Their garments are unsullied by the mire of life because they have never felt the cravings of their animal Soul for those things through which it derives its nourishment. In them the Animal Soul entirely slumbers; the strength and power with which its development endows the Soul who has conquered its temptations and made it subject to the higher self is not theirs, for they have never shared in life’s conflicts, and the fierce fires of passion have never been kindled in their hearts.
In the pure white and silver rays of the Star which dominates this sphere there are found no traces of any color, no shadow of a darker, deeper tint, no warmth, no glow of passion: all is pure and perfect in its purity as the driven snow, and as cold, for those whom no earthly passion has
ever sullied live in a land of dazzling silver light where there is no sun; no fire has ever warmed them, no shadow darkened their lives, no regrets from their own lives or from the lives of others have saddened or touched them; no green moss of hallowed memories hides their sorrowful or sinful past, as moss and ivy cling to and cover up the broken stones of an earthly ruin, veiling its ragged fissures with a tender touch, and hiding its marred and broken walls and its disfigured beauties.
No flowers but the snow white flowers of purity and the pale blue and silver blossoms of truth bloom in the lands of the snow white spheres: all is pale and colorless like the lives of its Angels and its Saints. Those who live here cannot enter into man’s joys and sorrows, his sins or his triumphs over sins, his hopes and ambitions, his disappointments, his anguish and despair, for they have felt none of these things.
For them the gates of Paradise are open continually and they can behold the fair things within, but they cannot behold at all the dark gates of Hell. All that is beautiful, all that is pure in Art, in Music, in Literature, in Science, yea, in all Life, lies open before their eyes, and they can read of the beautiful in everything: but of the dark books of sorrow and suffering and sin they cannot read one line, and their sight cannot behold material things save very dimly, for material life has been a sealed book to them. Thus even in the beauty of their lives there is a want. Perfect as they would seem, their lives are yet incomplete, since one half of their Souls still slumbers, and, it is for such as these that reincarnation has been thought an aid, and for such Souls as these the process of assuming the earthly body which has been prepared for them will be different from that of a Soul which has not yet attained a conscious life.
There are others who are sent to learn Earth’s lessons by so closely and completely identifying themselves with some Soul of the same sex already incarnate in the flesh, and which is, in all its tastes and aspirations, in closest affinity with their own, that through all its earthly life and trials they may share the same emotions and the same experiences. To make the experience valuable to the disincarnate Soul, they must become in all essential respects as one, and share as twins the material development given to them by Mother Earth. Even then the disincarnate Soul will but imperfectly learn its lesson, and the full meaning of sorrow and suffering and trial. It will feel but the reflected emotion of its twin Soul, never its fullest and deepest anguish, its warmth of passion, its depths of despair; and therefore it is that many celestial teachers would bid the Soul return to Earth, and in its own proper person, live the life of Earth.
The sphere of darkness is dominated, by a deep Red Star, which glows like the heart of a furnace, surrounded by black and blood tinged rays. In the regions dominated by this Star all appears clouded with a black sulfurous smoke, and all vegetation is withered up by the blasting fires of unrestrained passion and unchecked desires. The dry ashes of burnt-out volcanic lives have buried the blossoms of the Soul beneath their scorching dust, and the withered sticks of what were once the trees and shrubs of good intentions and good desires stand out like gaunt sentinels to mark where the purer life of the Soul once flourished. The desolation of despair, of crushed and blighted hopes, is shed around on everything. The dark rivers of bitter tears shed by tardy and unavailing regret alone water that sad land, and their scalding streams can never fertilize it, but only add to its dead seas another rolling wave where already there are too many flowing over the sad
ruins of the city of the Soul. Yet in the fierce flowing fires within the heart of the Star a healing balm is found by those who have the fortitude and courage to seek it; a purifying bath, in which the pure gold of the Soul is refined and freed from the alloy of gross and material passions. And from this purifying crucible, the Soul shall come forth to rise to the spheres of that glorious third Star which, gleams golden-rayed and crystal-clear, above both the other stars; even as the Golden Star is the Crown and Diadem of the heavenly spheres. From this Star dart many rays tinged with all the colors of the rainbow, which, sparkle like the jewels in a victor’s crown. The crimson rays no longer typify the passions of the Soul, but its tenderness and its love. The blue and white no longer show alone its purity, but its truth and constancy. The soft green denotes its sympathy, the violet, its regal power, the Gold, its spiritual strength.
The dwellers in the spheres of the Golden Star have all learned the lesson of Earth-life. They have all cultivated the sympathies as well as the purity and intellect of their Souls, and none enter its gates whom have not learned in their own lives to suffer and be strong that they may sympathize with and strengthen others. In the complex nature of man and the conditions of his Earth life it is but seldom that we see the distinct characteristics of each of these Stars clearly defined, and as a rule men partake in a greater or less degree of the attributes of both the light and dark spheres. Those who show either class of qualities in an abnormal degree, so that they stand forth as great moral teachers, or as cruel and degraded tyrants, are decidedly the exceptions. And yet it is the exceptional lives which stand forth for all time from the lives of their fellow men, like pictures painted
upon large canvases in broad, strong touches, whose meaning can be read even by the most ignorant, while the delicate minute finish of a miniature, requiring a close inspection and a knowledge of its workmanship to reveal its beauties, is lost upon the world at large.
The minute lives of ordinary men and women are no less useful and beneficial than those of exceptional characters, but they do not serve the same purpose in the lessons afforded by them. It is the lives of those who are great, either in their virtues or in their vices, which mark the progress which the world has made, and serve either as beacons to warn others of the shoals and rocks and quicksands upon which their own lives were wrecked, or as guiding stars to light the Soul upon its Heavenward way.
From Chapter X: The Redemption of The Fallen Angels
“The Angels of Light mine eyes have not beheld since the days of mine own youth on Earth, when I was vouchsafed dim glimpses of their glorious forms. For thou mayest know that I was dedicated unto the Priesthood. Temptation assailed me, and I fell, transgressing my vows and fleeing at last from the Temple where I served. Then did the love of occult knowledge appeal to mine ambitions, and led me yet
further astray, till the serpent of Evil, as men call their own base desires in the hope that they thus transfer a share of their responsibility to the personification of the Evil principle. Extinguished the good, and only the charms of the senses now allure me. The only Angels I can see are such as these; yet do I know that in the bright spheres there are Angels, the glory of whose Kingdoms no words of man can paint.”
“Are these angels, then, a separate creation from man?” I asked. “It hath been taught that the Angels in Heaven rebelled against “ORMUZD” and were cast forth. Are these Beings before us some of those fallen Angels?”
“Thou mayest call them fallen Angels if thou dost desire, for if a man sin, doth not the Angel that is within him fall into subjection to his lower nature? But if thou dost mean that these were ever angels dwelling in the Heaven of the Bright Spheres, then I tell thee No. For no conquest is possible
there. The very harmony by which they exist, and which is the very essence of the difference between them and us, forbids aught of contest in their Spheres. These Angels of Darkness, like Kindred Angels of Light, are alike the offspring of mortality. All have once known material life upon some planet, but in ages so remote that there are no records left to man of their histories. “It hath been told to me, but I know not whether it be true, since I know only what the experiences of the Dark Spheres can teach, that the Dark Angels do in time cast off the scales of Darkness and arise from sin, and through paths whose ways are extended beyond our power to follow, they ascend at last to the state of the Bright Angels, and reign in the glorious realms of the Golden Star. But inasmuch as the evil they have wrought hath been colossal, even so must the path of their repentance be colossal in its difficulties, and the sum of their atonement almost beyond the power of our
thoughts to conceive. Even for such as I am, the path of Repentance seems so long and hard, stretching as it does through all the many centuries in which I have lived and sinned, that though there are times when I turn my longing eyes towards it, in weariness of the scenes around me here, I hesitate and shrink back from its difficulties and its infinite toil and suffering. The gross pleasures of my senses still enthrall me, and even my thirst for the higher knowledge of the Spheres of light cannot draw me to the path by which alone I can hope to win it.
If at times my Divine Soul is awakened by the thought of the unexplored wonders that the Light Spheres must contain, and which my intellect ever tells me would repay me for all my sufferings, my animal Soul drowns the pure whisperings with its fierce clamorings for those gross pleasures which
only the Earth can afford to it, and again and yet again, I return to Earth and seek the control of an Earthly body as a means of gratifying the all potent demands of that baser self which is too strong for the higher aspirations of my better nature.
Thus do I chain myself within these spheres. Thus have I sunk to where I dwell now, and if I seek to rise, it can only be by drawing up with me step by step, all those whom I have drawn down. Their number is legion, and each one is as a great load of iron that I must raise even as I raise myself.
NOT ONE can I neglect or leave behind.
“Wonder not, then, that I stand as one stands shivering on the banks of an icy stream, hesitating to plunge into that cleansing flood which flows over difficulties and through lands of suffering which it appalls me to contemplate. And if it must be thus with me, such as I am, who though, as ye
may think, have sinned almost past redemption, what must be the task of Repentance to these mighty Rulers? What the periods of time through which they will have to labor?”
“And yet it hath been taught by certain of our Prophets that there was ultimate redemption even for the fallen Angels.
From Chapter XVII: The Twin Soul
“But see, in yonder chamber there is a young maid who is menaced by a fate worse than any death, for since she hath not yet been formally dedicated unto the Gods, she hath not even that shadowy mantle of sanctity to protect her. Her
beauty hath awakened the voluptuous admiration of one of these priests, and he hath persuaded her family to place her within these walls, under the pretext that the Gods have specially desired her service. The circumstance that she hath unquestionably certain spiritual gifts hath given color to this idea, and this evening she hath been brought into this Temple.” He pointed to a small chamber in a different part of the temple from that which I had been studying, and I saw a young and very lovely maid, scarce fifteen-years of age, lying slumbering on a pile of very soft cushions. She had evidently wept herself to sleep, for the tears trembled still upon the long, dark lashes which veiled the lustrous dark eyes. Her long, dark hair hung about her slender, childish form like a veil of night. Her delicate features were beautiful in the extreme, and her skin white as snow and tinged on
either cheek with a color as faint as the most delicate tint of a blush rose, while her slightly parted lips were red as the beautiful sea coral.
As I gazed upon her as one spell-bound I had a vague feeling that she was strangely familiar to my eyes, and then I remembered the vague half-seen visions of my boyhood, when I had dreamed of what the realization of my ideal of love was like, and I knew that this girl, this lovely, innocent child, was the embodiment of those dreams, her face the one which had haunted all my dreams of love, till the actual vision of Zuleika had put the childlike one to flight and supplanted it with the more material allurements of her attraction; an attraction which had never sufficed to satisfy the vague longing of my heart for my unseen Ideal.
Zuleika had awakened the love of my passions; this child stirred to its depths, the emotion of my Soul. I forgot all
things as I gazed upon her. I forgot that I was a Spirit and she a mortal, and that between us there rose the barrier of her earthly state. I forgot also mine own aged form in the young ardor of my heart. I forgot even her peril. I was lost to all thoughts but the one thought of her innocent loveliness, her helpless youth. The voice of the Angel recalled me to the realities of the moment.
“Yea,” said he, “she is indeed thy twin Soul, born into life in the Heavenly Spheres in the same moment as thine own, and traveling thence to find again her reunion with thee. The Twin Souls are as two halves of a golden circlet, each broken and incomplete without the other, yet united they form the perfect whole, the magic circle of love, whose existence hath no longer either beginning or ending. The golden ring that men place upon the finger of their brides, is
the symbol of this perfect reunion.