ed, lust or cruelty, it
throws into vibration the grossest of the astral body's matter, for only
in that can it be expressed. If it is an exalted emotion, such as love,
sympathy, devotion, courage or benevolence, it affects only the rarer
grades of astral matter, for in them only can such feeling be expressed.

With most people there is a constant mingling of a wide range of
emotions, with a gain in one direction and a loss in another. One who
fortunately understands the law of emotional cause and effect may make
absolutely certain of a comfortable sojourn upon the astral plane after
death. He would make it a rule to watch his emotions and control them,
knowing that each time he indulged a gross one the vibration set up in
his astral body would strengthen and vivify the grossest grade of matter
in it, while pure and exalted emotions would strengthen the higher
grades. Ultimately, the grossest grade, becoming atrophied for the lack
of activity, would drop away from him.

The descriptions of purgatory given by the psychic scientists are
calculated to induce even the reckless to avoid it. If we could bring
together all the vilest men and women now living on the physical plane,
the crudest of murderers, the most besotted drunkards, the vilest
degenerates, the most conscienceless and vindictive fiends of every
description, and huddle them together in hovels reeking with filth, and
let them remain without any outward government, free to prey upon each
other, we should perhaps have a faint comprehension of the reality of
the lowest subdivision of the astral world. But no physical plane
comparison can do it full justice, for we must remember that it is the
emotional world and that the feelings of its inhabitants make its
atmosphere in a way that would here be impossible. Astral matter
instantly and exactly reproduces emotion, so that the fiend or the
sensualist looks exactly what he feels. Even in the unresponsive
physical matter, the evil in a man is often sufficiently expressed to
fill those who behold him with terror. In the astral world every cruel
thought and hideous emotion would express itself in visible form and the
multitudinous emotions welling up in the lower level of the astral
world would be as a loathsome swarm of reptiles gliding through its
horrible life. Add to all that the fact that the hopeless despair of its
denizens gives an atmosphere of utter gloom and desolation, and we have
a hell that leaves no need o