ardens, decidedly superior
to anything in the physical world; though on the other hand it also
contains much which to the trained clairvoyant (who has learned to see
things as they are) appears ridiculous--as, for example, the endeavours of
the unlearned to make a thought-form of some of the curious symbolic
descriptions contained in their various scriptures. An ignorant peasant's
thought-image of a beast full of eyes within, or of a sea of glass mingled
with fire, is naturally often grotesque, although to its maker it is
perfectly satisfactory. This astral world is full of thought-created
figures and landscapes. Men of all religions image here their deities and
their respective conceptions of paradise, and enjoy themselves greatly
among these dream-forms until they pass into the mental world and come into
touch with something nearer to reality.

Every one after death--any ordinary person, that is, in whose case the
rearrangement of the matter of the astral body has been made--has to pass
through all these subdivisions in turn. It does not follow that every one
is conscious in all of them. The ordinarily decent person has in his astral
body but little of the matter of its lowest portion--by no means enough to
construct a heavy shell. The redistribution puts on the outside of the body
its densest matter; in the ordinary man this is usually matter of the sixth
subdivision, mixed with a little of the seventh, and so he finds himself
viewing the counterpart of the physical world.

The ego is steadily withdrawing into himself, and as he withdraws he leaves
behind him level after level of this astral matter. So the length of the
man's detention in any section of the astral world is precisely in
proportion to the amount of its matter which is found in his astral body,
and that in turn depends upon the life he has lived, the desires he has
indulged, and the class of matter which by so doing he has attracted
towards him and built into himself. Finding himself then in the sixth
section, still hovering about the places and persons with which he was most
closely connected while on earth, the average man, as time passes on, finds
the earthly surroundings gradually growing dimmer and becoming of less and
less importance to him, and he tends more and more to mould his entourage
into agreement with the more persistent of his thoughts. By the time that
he reaches the third level he finds that this characteristic has entirely
superseded