d not be forgotten that it is only the limitation of the physical
senses that gives rise to the feeling of unreality beyond the visible.
We should keep in mind the fact that the invisible realms are composed
of matter as certainly as the air is matter, or a stone is matter. The
water in a pan may evaporate, but it does not cease to be matter because
it has passed beyond the ken of the physical senses. It will some time
condense once more and play its part as the liquid, water, or as the
solid, ice. Only when matter is in certain forms can we know of its
existence through the physical senses.

We frequently hear people who are students of the occult speak of a
deceased person as having left the earth. But passing into the astral
plane, or world, is not, of course, leaving the earth. Both the astral
world and the mental world are divisions of the earth. As the atmosphere
is invisible and yet is a part of the earth's physical matter, so the
invisible astral and mental regions are other parts of the earth. They
are properly called worlds because the activities in consciousness that
make up existence there are as remote from ours as though they were upon
another planet. We have erroneously supposed that with the physical
senses we really see and know the earth, whereas we have known only that
small fragment of the earth that consists of physical matter. Beyond the
limitation of our poor senses stretch in unsuspected grandeur vaster
regions of our earth, swept by the vibrations of an intenser life.

CHAPTER VI.

THE MECHANISM OF CONSCIOUSNESS

The soul is a center of consciousness within the all-consciousness, or
the life of the solar Logos; an individualized portion of the universal
mind. That fragment of the divine life, with its latent God-like
attributes, is expressed through a mechanism of consciousness that is
formed of the matter of the various planes. Naturally enough it is
expressed more fully upon the higher planes than upon the lower. At a
very high level it is known as the monad. When it reaches down into the
higher subdivisions of the mental world it is the ego, a lesser
expression of the same divine life that pours from the Logos through the
monad--lesser because it is then functioning through the denser matter
of a lower level.

The knowledge that has been gained about the nature of matter in recent
years is helpful in understanding the activities of consciousness. The
atom is found to be a center