he friend, feeling
this vibration, at once and eagerly responds to it, and pours himself into
the thought-form, which has been made for him; so that the man's friend is
truly present with him more vividly than ever before. To this result it
makes no difference whatever whether the friend is what we call living or
dead; the appeal is made not to the fragment of the friend which is
sometimes imprisoned in a physical body, but to the man himself on his own
true level; and he always responds. A man who has a hundred friends can
simultaneously and fully respond to the affection of every one of them, for
no number of representations on a lower level can exhaust the infinity of
the ego.

Thus every man in his heaven-life has around him all the friends for whose
company he wishes, and they are for him always at their best, because he
himself makes for them the thought-form through which they manifest to him.
In our limited physical world we are so accustomed to thinking of our
friend as only the limited manifestation which we know in the physical
world, that it is at first difficult for us to realize the grandeur of the
conception; when we can realize it, we shall see how much nearer we are in
truth to our friends in the heaven-life than we ever were on earth. The
same is true in the case of devotion. The man in the heaven-world is two
great stages nearer to the object of his devotion than he was during
physical life, and so his experiences are of a far more transcendent
character.

In this mental world, as in the astral, there are seven subdivisions. The
first, second and third are the habitat of the ego in his causal body, so
the mental body contains matter of the remaining four only, and it is in
those sections that his heaven-life is passed. Man does not, however, pass
from one to the other of these, as is the case in the astral world, for
there is nothing in this life corresponding to the rearrangement. Rather is
the man drawn to the level which best corresponds to the degree of his
development, and on that level he spends the whole of his life in the
mental body. Each man makes his own conditions, so that the number of
varieties is infinite.

Speaking broadly, we may say that the dominant characteristic observed in
the lowest portion is unselfish family affection. Unselfish it must be, or
it would find no place here; all selfish tinges, if there were any, worked
out their results in the astral world. The dominant charac