superseded the vision of the realities of the astral world.

The second subdivision is a shade less material than the third, for if the
latter is the summerland of the spiritualists, the former is the material
heaven of the more ignorantly orthodox; while the first or highest level
appears to be the special home of those who during life have devoted
themselves to materialistic but intellectual pursuits, following them not
for the sake of benefiting their fellow men, but either from motives of
selfish ambition or simply for the sake of intellectual exercise. All these
people are perfectly happy. Later on they will reach a stage when they can
appreciate something much higher, and when that stage comes they will find
the higher ready for them.

In this astral life people of the same nation and of the same interest tend
to keep together, precisely as they do here. The religious people, for
example, who imagine for themselves a material heaven, do not at all
interfere with men of other faiths whose ideas of celestial joy are
different. There is nothing to prevent a Christian from drifting into the
heaven of the Hindu or the Muhammadan, but he is little likely to do so,
because his interests and attractions are all in the heaven of his own
faith, along with friends who have shared that faith with him. This is by
no means the true heaven described by any of the religions, but only a
gross and material misrepresentation of it; the real thing will be found
when we come to consider the mental world.

The dead man who has not permitted the rearrangement of the matter of his
astral body is free of the entire world, and can wander all over it at
will, seeing the whole of whatever he examines, instead of only a part of
it as the others do. He does not find it inconveniently crowded, for the
astral world is much larger than the surface of the physical earth, while