This is the time during which the thought-images of the ended earth-life, clustering around their maker, group and interweave themselves into the completed image of that life, and are impressed in their totality on the Astral Light.  The dominant tendencies, the strongest thought-habits, assert their pre-eminence, and stamp themselves as the characteristics which will appear as “innate qualities” in the succeeding incarnation.  This balancing-up of the life-issues, this reading of the karmic records, is too solemn and momentous a thing to be disturbed by the ill-timed wailings of personal relatives and friends.

At the solemn moment of death every man, even when death is sudden, sees the whole of his past life marshalled before him, in its minutest details.  For one short instant the personal become one with the individual and all-knowing Ego.  But this instant is enough to show to him the whole chain of causes which have been at work during his life.  He sees and now understands himself as he is, unadorned by flattery or self-deception.  He reads his life, remaining as a spectator, looking down into the arena he is quitting.[13]

This vivid sight is succeeded, in the ordinary person, by the dreamy, peaceful semi-consciousness spoken of above, as the etheric double floats above the body to which it has belonged, now completely separated from it.

Sometimes this double is seen by persons in the house, or in the neighbourhood, when the thought of the dying has been strongly turned to some one left behind, when some anxiety has been in the mind at the last, something left undone which needed doing, or when some local disturbance has shaken the tranquillity of the passing entity.  Under these conditions, or others of a similar nature, the double may be seen or heard; when seen, it shows the dreamy, hazy consciousness alluded to, is silent, vague in its aspect, unresponsive.

As the days go on, the five higher principles gradually disengage themselves from the etheric double, and shake this off as they previously shook off the grosser body.  They pass on, as a fivefold entity, into a state to be next studied, leaving the etheric double, with the dense body of which it is the counterpart, thus becoming an ethereal corpse, as much as the body had become a dense corpse.  This ethereal corpse remains near the dense one, and they disintegrate together; clairvoyants see these ethereal wraiths in churchyards, sometimes showing likeness to the dead dense body, sometimes as violet mists or lights.  Such an ethereal corpse has been seen by a friend of my own, passing through the horribly repulsive stages of decomposition, a ghastly vision in face of which clairvoyance was certainly no blessing.  The process goes on pari passu, until all but the actual bony skeleton of the dense body is completely disintegrated, and the particles have gone to form other combinations.

One of the great advantages of cremation—­apart from all sanitary conditions—­lies in the swift restoration to Mother Nature of the physical elements composing the dense and ethereal corpses, brought about by the burning.  Instead of slow and gradual decomposition, swift dissociation takes place, and no physical remnants are left, working possible mischief.