Death is the laying aside of the physical body; but it makes no more
difference to the ego than does the laying aside of an overcoat to the
physical man. Having put off his physical body, the ego continues to live
in his astral body until the force has become exhausted which has been
generated by such emotions and passions as he has allowed himself to feel
during earth-life. When that has happened, the second death takes place;
the astral body also falls away from him, and he finds himself living in
the mental body and in the lower mental world. In that condition he remains
until the thought-forces generated during his physical and astral lives
have worn themselves out; then he drops the third vehicle in its turn and
remains once more an ego in his own world, inhabiting his causal body.

There is, then, no such thing as death as it is ordinarily understood.
There is only a succession of stages in a continuous life--stages lived in
the three worlds one after another. The apportionment of time between these
three worlds varies much as man advances. The primitive man lives almost
exclusively in the physical world, spending only a few years in the astral
at the end of each of his physical lives. As he develops, the astral life
becomes longer, and as intellect: unfolds in him, and he becomes able to
think, he begins to spend a little time in the mental world as well. The
ordinary man of civilized races remains longer in the mental world than in
the physical and astral; indeed, the more a man evolves the longer becomes
his mental, life and the shorter his life in the astral world.

The astral life is the result of all feelings which have in them the
element of self. If they have been directly selfish, they bring him into
conditions of great unpleasantness in the astral world; if, though tinged
with thoughts of self, they have been good and kindly, they bring him a
comparatively pleasant though still limited astral life. Such of his
thoughts and feelings as have been entirely unselfish produce their results