red by a
conveyance, in head, neck, breast and shoulders. The gentleman believed
and intended to heed our warning. Nevertheless he went to Sierra Madre to
lecture upon the fateful day. He was injured in the places stated by a
collision and later explained: "I thought the twenty-eighth was the
twenty-ninth."

When the spirit has made its choice, it descends into the second heaven
where it is instructed by the Angels and Archangels how to build an
archetype of the body which it will later inhabit upon earth. Also here we
note the operation of the great law of justice which decrees that we reap
what we sow. If our tastes are coarse and sensual, we shall build an
archetype which will express these qualities; if we are refined and of
aesthetic taste, we shall build an archetype correspondingly refined, but
no one can obtain a better body than he can build. Then, as the architect
who builds a house in which he afterwards lives, will suffer discomfort if
he neglects to properly ventilate it, so also the spirit feels disease in
a poorly constructed body, and as the architect learns to avoid mistakes
and remedy the short-comings of one house when building another, so also
the spirit which suffers from defects in its body, learns in time to build
better and better vehicles.

In the Region of Concrete Thought, the spirit also draws to itself
materials for a new mind. As a magnet draws iron filings but leaves other
substances alone, so also each spirit draws only the kind of mind-stuff
which it used in its former life, plus that which it has learned to use in
its present post-mortem state. Then it descends into the Desire World
where it gathers material for a new desire body such as will express
appropriately its moral characteristics, and later it attracts a certain
amount of ether which is built into the mold of the archetype constructed
in the second heaven and acts as cement between the solids, liquids and
gaseous material from the bodies of parents which forms the dense physical
body of a child, and in due time the latter is brought to birth.

_Birth and Child Life._

It must not be imagined, however, that when the little body of a child has
been born, the process of birth is completed. The dense physical body has
had the longest evolution, and as a shoemaker who has worked at his trade
for a number of years is more expert than an apprentice and can make
better shoes and _quicker_, so also the spirit which has built many
p