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The Tenth Lesson: The Astral World159
you have almost forgotten by this time, but to which you are still bound by
these almost invisible ties. You pass on clothed in a new body, or rather an
inner garment of ethereal matter, for it seems as if you have been merely
shedding one cloak, and then another, the you part of yourself remains
unchanged—you smile now at the recollection that once upon a time you
thought that the body was “you.” The plane of the “astral shells” fades away,
and you seem to have entered a great room of sleeping forms, lying at rest
and in peace, the only moving shapes being those from higher spheres who
have descended to this plane in order to perform tasks for the good of their
humbler brethren. Occasionally some sleeper will show signs of awakening,
and at once some of these helpers will cluster around him, and seem to melt
away into some other plane with him. But the most wonderful thing about
this region seems to be that as the sleeper awakens slowly, his astral body
slips away from him just as did yours a little before, and passes out of that
plane to the place of “shells,” where it slowly disintegrates and is resolved
into its original elements. This discarded shell is not connected with the
physical body of the sleeping soul, which physical body has been buried or
cremated, as it is “dead”; nor is the shell connected with the soul which has
gone on, as it has finally discarded it and thrown it off. It is different in your
case, for you have merely left it in the ante-room, and will return and resume
its use, presently.
The scene again changes, and you find yourself in the regions of the
awakened souls, through which you, with your guides, wander backward
and forward. You notice that as the awakening souls pass along, they seem
to rapidly drop sheath after sheath of their mental-bodies (for so these
higher forms of ethereal coverings are called), and you notice that as you
move toward the higher planes your substance becomes more and more
etherealized, and that as you return to the lower planes it becomes coarser
and grosser, although always far more etherealized than even the astral
body, and infinitely finer than the material physical body. You also notice
that each awakening soul is left to finally awaken on some particular plane.