happiness of astral life.  Sometimes in their desperation they grasp blindly at other bodies, and try to enter into them, and occasionally they are successful in such an attempt.  They may seize upon a baby body, ousting the feeble personality for whom it was intended, or sometimes they grasp even the body of an animal.  All this trouble arises entirely from ignorance, and it can never happen to anyone who understands the laws of life and death.

When the astral life is over, the man dies to that world in turn, and awakens in the mental world.  With him it is not at all what it is to the trained clairvoyant, who ranges through it and lives amidst the surroundings which he finds there, precisely as he would in the physical or astral worlds.  The ordinary man has all through his life been encompassing himself with a mass of thought-forms.  Some which are transitory, to which he pays little attention, have fallen away from him long ago, but those which represent the main interests of his life are always with him, and grow ever stronger and stronger.  If some of these have been selfish, their force pours down into astral matter, and he has exhausted them during his life in the astral world.  But those which are entirely unselfish belong purely to his mental body, and so when he finds himself in the mental world it is through these special thoughts that he is able to appreciate it.

His mental body is by no means fully developed; only those parts of it are really in action to their fullest extent which he has used in this altruistic manner.  When he awakens again after the second death, his first sense is one of indescribable bliss and vitality—­a feeling of such utter joy in living that he needs for the time nothing but just to live.  Such bliss is of the essence of life in all the higher worlds of the system.  Even astral life has possibilities of happiness far greater than anything that we can know in the dense body; but the heaven-life in the mental world is out of all proportion more blissful than the astral.  In each higher world the same experience is repeated.  Merely to live in any one of them seems the uttermost conceivable bliss; and yet, when the next one is reached, it is seen that it far surpasses the last.

Just as the bliss increases, so does the wisdom and the breadth of view.  A man fusses about in the physical world and thinks himself so busy and so wise; but when he touches even the astral, he realizes at once that he has been all the time only a caterpillar crawling about and seeing nothing but his own leaf, whereas now he has spread his wings like the butterfly and flown away into the sunshine of a wider world.  Yet, impossible as it may seem, the same experience is repeated when he passes into the mental world, for this life is in turn so much fuller and wider and more intense than the astral that once more no comparison is possible.  And yet beyond all these there is still another life, that of the intuitional world, unto which even this is but as moonlight unto sunlight.