. During this sleep of the physical body the man is
free to move about in the astral world; but the extent to which he does
this depends upon his development. The primitive savage usually does not
move more than a few miles away from his sleeping physical form--often not
as much as that; and he has only the vaguest consciousness.

The educated man is generally able to travel in his astral vehicle wherever
he will, and has much more consciousness in the astral world, though he has
not often the faculty of bringing into his waking life any memory of what
he has seen and done while his physical body was asleep. Sometimes he does
remember some incident which he has seen, some experience which he has had,
and then he calls it a vivid dream. More often his recollections are
hopelessly entangled with vague memories of waking life, and with
impressions made from without upon the etheric part of his brain. Thus we
arrive at the confused and often absurd dreams of ordinary life. The
developed man becomes as fully conscious and active in the astral world as
in the physical, and brings through into the latter full remembrance of
what he has been doing in the former--that is, he has a continuous life
without any loss of consciousness throughout the whole twenty-four hours,
and thus throughout the whole of his physical life, and even through death
itself.

Chapter VI

AFTER DEATH

Death is the laying aside of the physical body; but it makes no more
difference to the ego than does the laying aside of an overcoat to the
physical man. Having put off his physical body, the ego continues to live
in his astral body until the force has become exhausted which has been
generated by such emotions and passions as he has allowed himself to feel
during earth-life. When that has happened, the second death takes place;
the astral body also falls away from him, and he finds himself living in
the mental body and in the lower mental world. In that condition he remains
until the thought-forces generated during his physical and astral lives
have worn themselves out; then he drops the third vehicle in its turn and
remains once more an ego in his own world, inhabiting his causal body.

There is, then, no such thing as death as it is ordinarily understood.
There is only a succession of stages in a continuous life--stages lived in
the three worlds one after another. The apportionment of time between these
three worlds varies much as man advances