f doubt and despair it gives us confidence and
joy, for it guarantees the companionship once more of those we have
known and loved, and erroneously supposed we have lost.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE ASTRAL WORLD

When the physical body dies there is an interval between the loss of
consciousness here and the dawning of the astral consciousness. During
that interim a review of the life scenes takes place. Everything between
birth and death passes again through the consciousness, as it thus
pauses in the etheric double, between the life activities of two worlds.
Then peaceful unconsciousness follows, from which the man awakes in the
astral world.

To those accustomed to thinking of the dying as passing to some remote
heaven, where they become angels, it will perhaps sound startling to say
that a dead man is not aware at first that the change we call death has
taken place. Yet that is a common experience. Nor is it at all
remarkable that it should be so with many. We have only to recall the
fact that all physical matter is surrounded and permeated with astral
matter to realize that the physical plane is duplicated in astral
matter. Not only the physical body of the human being but, of course,
every physical object, has its astral duplicate. The dying man loses
consciousness of the physical plane and awakes as from a sleep to the
astral consciousness. He sees then the exact duplicate, in astral
matter, of the familiar scenes he has left behind. He sees, too, his
friends, for their astral bodies are replicas of their physical forms.

And yet, notwithstanding all this there is a difference, though not a
difference that enables him to comprehend what has occurred. He may know
that only yesterday, or what seems to him to have been yesterday, he was
ill and confined to his bed, and was perhaps told that he was about to
die; and now he is not ill; indeed, he never felt so free from aches and
pains in all his life. The pulsing energies and exhilaration of youth
are his again! This mystifies him. He sees his friends and naturally
speaks to them, but gets no reply and finds that he can not attract
their attention. It must be remembered that he can not see their
physical bodies any more than they can see his astral body. Yet he truly
sees them. If a so-called dead man and a living person look at the same
instant at another living person they will both see him, but the latter
sees the physical body while the former sees the astral