nly but the matter of
the astral body gradually wears away until there is so little left that
the soul has lost connection with the astral world also. This means that
the center of consciousness has shifted to the mental plane, or heaven
world, where the man will function on the lower levels.

There in the mental world, functioning through the vehicle of mental
matter, a very important process goes on. The heaven world life is a
harvest time in which assimilation of experience takes place. The
consciousness there deeply broods over the experiences of life and
extracts the essence from them which is transmuted into faculty and
power for future greater expression. It is thus that the soul grows in
wisdom and power through its long evolution.

When the heaven life is finished, when the harvest of experience has
been threshed out and the net gain has been built into the enduring
causal body, the mental body, like the astral, has been completely
dissipated. The end of a cycle of experience--of a day in the
evolutionary school--has come and the physical, astral and mental bodies
have all perished. Nothing remains but the soul, the real man, the ego,
functioning through the causal body which persists. From that the ego
again sends the forces outward, in the first activity toward rebirth,
first forming a new mental body by drawing about itself the matter of
the lower levels of the mental plane, then securing a new astral body on
the astral plane and finally taking possession of another infant body in
process of formation on the physical plane, into which it will in due
course be reborn.

The period between these successive appearances of the soul in a
succession of physical bodies varies greatly and depends on a number of
things. The length of time spent upon the astral plane has already been
discussed. The time spent in the heaven world depends upon the mental
and moral forces generated during the physical and astral life. If there
is a great harvest of experience it will require a longer time to
transmute it, while, of course, one who has thought little and loved but
little will have a shorter period there, for it is the heart and head
forces that have their culmination in the mental world. The question is
a rather complex one and other factors come into play, including the
intensity of the heaven world life. In general terms, however, it can be
said that the heaven life of the ordinarily intelligent person will
commonly b