igher, joyous life of the astral world were
open to our consciousness, then concentration upon the duties of this
life would be difficult, if not impossible. Our life in the physical
body may be compared to the tasks of children in school. They have
serious business before them in the acquiring of knowledge and the
development of the intellect. They can best accomplish the work when
completely isolated from other phases of life. Introduce into their
work-day consciousness the joys of a child's existence, the circus, the
military parade, the picnic and the dancing parties, and the purpose for
which the school exists would be defeated. To exactly the extent that
the consciousness is withdrawn from such things will desirable progress
be made with the work of the school-room. And so it is with the
limitation of our physical senses. It serves a purpose.

But there is a point in human evolution where such limitation of the
senses is no longer of any service and may be transcended. Some people
have attained it. They are those who have previously been referred to as
the psychic scientists, with the higher clairvoyance of the
cerebro-spinal system developed. It is an accomplishment to which all
may aspire. None need submit to the separation commonly caused by death.
By hard work in co-operating with nature's methods of evolution and by a
serious and sustained effort to live the highest and most helpful life
of which one is capable, it is possible in time to attain a level of
consciousness where one has personal knowledge that the dead still live.
But in the very work of rising to that level, the concentration
previously enforced by the limitation of the physical senses will have
been acquired.

One of the common delusions about death is that some radical change in
the nature of a person then takes place. This is no doubt due in part to
the theological ideas that have come down to us from the time of the
Middle Ages. It is popularly supposed that at death one comes to some
sort of a judgment that classes him as either a saint qualified for
eternal bliss or a fiend fit only for endless torture! The belief is
based on that erroneous view of human nature that was common to the
melodrama of a past generation and that will possibly have eternal life
in the cheap novel. It represented the hero as unqualifiedly good and
the villain as absolutely bad. The one had no flaw of character and the
other had not a redeeming feature. But human