they can be calculated without difficulty by any one who will take the
trouble to understand the astral world and to consider the character of the
person concerned. That character is not in the slightest degree changed by
death; the man's thoughts, emotions and desires are exactly the same as
before. He is in every way the same man, minus his physical body; and his
happiness or misery depends upon the extent to which this loss of the
physical body affects him.

If his longings have been such as need a physical body for their
gratification, he is likely to suffer considerably. Such a craving
manifests itself as a vibration in the astral body, and while we are still
in this world most of its strength is employed in setting in motion the
heavy physical particles. Desire is therefore a far greater force in the
astral life than in the physical, and if the man has not been in the habit
of controlling it, and if in this new life it cannot be satisfied, it may
cause him great and long-continued trouble.

Take as an illustration the extreme case of a drunkard or a sensualist.
Here we have a lust which has been strong enough during physical life to
overpower reason, common sense and all the feelings of decency and of
family affection. After death the man finds himself in the astral world
feeling the appetite perhaps a hundred times more strongly, yet absolutely
unable to satisfy it because he has lost the physical body. Such a life is
a very real hell--the only hell there is; yet no one is punishing him; he
is reaping the perfectly natural result of his own action. Gradually as
time passes this force of desire wears out, but only at the cost of
terrible suffering for the man, because to him every day seems as a
thousand years. He has no measure of time such as we have in the physical
world. He can measure it only by his sensations. From a distortion of this
fact has come the blasphemous idea of eternal damnation.

Many other cases less extreme than this will readily suggest themselves, in
which a hankering which cannot be fulfilled may prove itself a torture. A
more ordinary case is that of a man who has no particular vices, such as
drink or sensuality, but yet has been attached entirely to things of the
physical world, and has lived a life devoted to business or to aimless
social functions. For him the astral world is a place of weariness; the
only thing for which he craves are no longer possible for him, for in the
astral wor