. Old age represents the most gradual loosening of the life
forces from the material plane, and that has many advantages.

Release from the physical body by disease is next in order of
desirability. It is a quicker and less complete breaking down of the
connection with the physical world. Nevertheless it is a condition in
which much progress may be made in getting free from physical desires,
as those who have had experience with invalids are aware. Desires
usually grow weaker with the progress of the disease that finally ends
in death.

Release from the physical form by violence is, of course, the least
desirable of the three, not merely because it is violence, but for the
much more important reason that sudden death finds the man, as a rule,
with a considerable amount of the lower grades of astral matter in his
astral body.

Whether the death by violence is the result of accident, murder, suicide
or legal execution, the astral plane conditions of consciousness are
alike unfortunate, in that it is sudden death, not the manner of death,
that permits entry upon the astral life before the lower grades of
astral matter have been eliminated from the astral body. This is one
reason why suicide is unfortunate--because it ushers the man into the
astral world with more of the matter of the lower levels in his astral
vehicle than would be there if he had lived out his normal physical
life.

Purgatory is a term often applied to the lowest level of the astral
world. The word is well chosen because it is there that the moral nature
is purged of its impurities. Strong desires cultivated and indulged
during the life in the physical body are eliminated with the gross
astral matter through which alone they can be expressed and, freed to
that extent, the man passes to the next subdivision, and into its higher
state of consciousness.

In the astral life some people linger long on the lower levels while
others know them not at all, but awaken to the blissful consciousness of
the higher subdivisions. Nature is everywhere consistent, grouping
together people of a kind. It is, however, the manner in which one lives
during physical life that determines his happiness or sorrow after
death. The astral body, the seat of the emotions, is, like the physical
body, constantly changing the matter that composes it. An emotion of any
kind expresses itself as a vibration in the matter of the astral body.
If it is a base emotion, such as anger, hatr