il deeds. Let us say he has committed murder. When the reaction
of the evil force he has generated is over and he passes on into the
heaven plane it does not mean that he is incapable of future evil. It
means that he has probably learned thoroughly the lesson that it is very
foolish to take life. But there are many other lessons he has not
learned. When he passes into the heaven world he leaves all evil behind
him. He is as one who puts his shoes aside to enter a temple. The astral
body, like the physical, has perished and it is the freed soul that
enters the heaven world. But when he returns through the astral plane to
reincarnation he is clothed again in astral matter and this new astral
body is exactly representative of his attainments in evolution. In his
coming incarnation he will have other physical plane experiences and
learn other lessons. The next time probably he will not kill, but
perhaps he will cheat and steal or be a drunkard. These errors will
react upon him in the astral life that follows. In a coming incarnation
he will be wise enough to be temperate and neither cheat nor steal; but
perhaps he will be a gossip and work much evil through slander. This in
turn will bring its pain. And so in time he will learn to generate no
evil force at all but to live in good will and helpfulness toward
everybody. Then his progress will be rapid indeed, his life on all
planes will be happy and the painful part of human evolution will be
over.

The purpose of evolution is no less obvious than the fact of evolution.
Evolution is an unfolding process in which the latent becomes the active
and the inner life is more and more fully expressed in outer form. The
development and improvement in form keeps pace with the necessities of
the unfolding life. In the lowest levels of the animal kingdom the form
is but a cell. But as the life comes into fuller and fuller expression,
limbs for locomotion and, in due course, the organs for hearing, and
seeing, and the other mechanism of the developing consciousness, are
evolved. In the human kingdom the vehicle of consciousness comes to its
highest possible form and then evolution goes on in the perfecting of
the physical form. In the process of continually changing the matter of
the body it is possible for the brain to be constantly improved and the
whole body to grow more and more sensitive and gradually to become a
better and truer expression of the evolving life within. In each
incarn