imes 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 ca