terpillar 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.

The man's position in the mental world differs widely from that in the
astral. There he was using a body to which he was thoroughly accustomed, a
body which he had been in the habit of employing every night during sleep.
Here he finds himself living in a vehicle which he has never used before--a
vehicle furthermore which is very far from being fully developed--a vehicle
which shuts him out to a great extent from the world about him, instead of
enabling him to see it. The lower part of his nature burnt itself away
during his purgatorial life, and now there remain to him only his higher
and more refined thoughts, the noble and unselfish aspirations which he
poured out during earth-life. These cluster round him, and make a sort of
shell about him, through the medium of which he is able to respond to
certain types of vibrations in this refined matter.

These thoughts which surround him are the powers by which he draws upon the
wealth of the heaven-world, and he finds it to be a storehouse of infinite
extent, upon which he is able to draw just according to the power of those
thoughts and aspirations; for in this world is existing the infinite
fullness of the Divine Mind, open in all its limitless affluence to every
soul, just in proportion as that soul has qualified itself to receive. A
man who has already completed his human evolution, who has fully realized
and unfolded the divinity whose germ is within him, finds the whole of this
glory within his reach; but since none of us has yet done that, since we
are only gradually rising towards that splendid consummation, it follows
that none of us as yet can grasp that entirety.

But each draws from it and cognizes so much of it as he has by previous
effort prepared himself to take. Different individuals bring very different
capacities; they tell us in the East that each man brings his own cup, and
some of the cups are large and some are small, but smal