mentality will realize that their condition, however beatific, is still one
of incompleteness; and that what is wanted for completion is expression
through a material body. This, then, is the direction in which such souls
would use their powers of initiative and selection as being the true line
of evolution--in a word they would realize that the principle of Creative
Progression, when it reaches the level of fully developed mental man,
necessarily implies the Resurrection of the Body, and that anything short
of this would be retrogression and not progress.

At the same time persons who had passed over with this knowledge would
never suppose that Resurrection meant merely the resuscitation of the old
body under the old conditions; for they would see that the same inherent
law which makes expression in concrete substance the ultimate of the
creative series also makes this ultimate form depend on the originating
movement of the spirit which produces it, and therefore that, although
_some_ concrete form is essential for complete manifestation, and is a
substantial reality so long as it is maintained, yet the maintaining of the
particular form is entirely dependent on the action of the spirit of which
the form is the external clothing. This resurrection body would therefore
be no mere illusory spirit-shape, yet it would not be subject to the
limitations of matter as we now know it: it would be physical matter still,
but entirely subject to the will of the indwelling spirit, which would not
regard the denser atomic relations of the body but only its absolute and
essential nature as Primary Substance. I want the student to grasp the idea
that the same thing may be very different when looked at, so to say, from
opposite ends of the stick. What is solid molecular matter when viewed from
the outside is plastic primary substance when viewed from the inside. The
relations of this new body to any stimulus proceeding from outside would be
those of the external laws of Nature; but its relation to the spiritual ego
working from within would be that of a plastic substance to be molded at