physical world, but with all the colour gone from them. It is a terrible
struggle for them to maintain their position in this miserable condition,
and yet they will not relax their hold upon the etheric double, feeling
that that is at least some sort of link with the only world that they know.
Thus they drift about in a condition of loneliness and misery until from
sheer fatigue their hold fails them, and they slip into the comparative
happiness of astral life. Sometimes in their desperation they grasp blindly
at other bodies, and try to enter into them, and occasionally they are
successful in such an attempt. They may seize upon a baby body, ousting the
feeble personality for whom it was intended, or sometimes they grasp even
the body of an animal. All this trouble arises entirely from ignorance, and
it can never happen to anyone who understands the laws of life and death.

When the astral life is over, the man dies to that world in turn, and
awakens in the mental world. With him it is not at all what it is to the
trained clairvoyant, who ranges through it and lives amidst the
surroundings which he finds there, precisely as he would in the physical or
astral worlds. The ordinary man has all through his life been encompassing
himself with a mass of thought-forms. Some which are transitory, to which
he pays little attention, have fallen away from him long ago, but those
which represent the main interests of his life are always with him, and
grow ever stronger and stronger. If some of these have been selfish, their
force pours down into astral matter, and he has exhausted them during his
life in the astral world. But those which are entirely unselfish belong
purely to his mental body, and so when he finds himself in the mental world
it is through these special thoughts that he is able to appreciate it.

His mental body is by no means fully developed; only those parts of it are
really in action to their fullest extent which he has used in this
altruistic manner. When he awakens again after the second death, his first