quently be very short, and most
probably he will have little more than a dreamy half-consciousness of
existence until he sinks into the sleep during which his higher
principles finally free themselves from the kamic envelope and enter
upon the blissful rest of Devachan.

For the person who has not as yet entered upon the path of occult
development, what has been described is the ideal state of affairs,
but naturally it is not attained by all, or even by the majority. The
average man has by no means freed himself from the lower desires
before death, and it takes a long period of more or less fully
conscious life on the astral plane to allow the forces he has
generated to work themselves out, and thus release the higher Ego. The
body which he occupies during this period is the Kamarupa which may be
described as a rearrangement of the matter of his astral body; but it
is much more defined in outline, and there is also this important
difference between the two that while the astral body, if sufficiently
awakened during life to function at all freely, would probably be able
to visit all, or at any rate most, of the subdivisions of its plane,
the Kamarupa has not that liberty, but is strictly confined to that
level to which its affinities have drawn it. It has, however, a
certain kind of progress connected with it, for it generally happens
that the forces a man has set in motion during earth-life need for
their appropriate working out a sojourn on more divisions than one of
the Kamaloka, and when this is the case a regular sequence is
observed, commencing with the lowest; so that when the Kamarupa has
exhausted its attractions to one level, the greater part of its
grosser particles fall away, and it finds itself in affinity with a
somewhat higher state of existence. Its specific gravity, as it were,
is constantly decreasing, and so it steadily rises from the denser to
the lighter strata, pausing only when it is exactly balanced for a
time. This is evidently the explanation of a remark frequently made by
the entities which appear at _seances_ to the effect that they are
about to rise to a higher sphere, from which it will be impossible, or
not so easy, to "communicate" through a medium; and it is as a matter
of fact true that a person upon the highest subdivision of this plane
would find it almost impossible to deal with any ordinary medium.

It ought perhaps to be explained here that the definiteness of outline
which distin