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Chapter VII: The Soul’s Awakening2201
individuals which is much higher and better than their everyday life and
actions would seem to indicate. Material environment and circumstances
tend to retard and prevent the expression of the best in us, in many cases.
Therefore, it is pleasant to know that on “the other side” the soul is relieved
of all that tends to hold it back and drag it down, and is rendered free to
express and develop those qualities and characteristics which represent the
best and truest that is in it. This fact accords not only with the sense of justice
and equity; not only with the longings and cravings of the imprisoned
soul, but also with the facts and principles of evolution, which ever attracts
upward and onward, toward some far off goal of attainment and perfection.
If passing on the plane of its future activities, the soul has discarded its
Astral body, that strange counterpart of the physical body is discarded still
further back. Henceforth the soul does not wear the form and shape of
the human being, but is something of a far higher order of being to which
the terms “shape” and “form” do not apply. Our physical bodies (and their
Astral counterparts) are the result of physical evolution, and are but the
bodies of developed animals. The soul on the higher planes has no need of
arms and legs, hands and feet,—it dwells where these instruments of a lower
form of expression are not needed. It is a being transcending the limitations
of physical life.
The discarded mental principles soon are resolved into their original
elements (but the discarded Astral body becomes what is known as an
“Astral shell,” and, forsaken by its former occupant it sinks, by what may be
called astral gravitation, to the lowest-planes of the Astral, there to slowly
disintegrate. The lower planes of the Astral are filled with these discarded
Astral shells, floating about in the Astral atmosphere. They are not pleasant
things to see, and happily the soul on the other side does not witness them,
for it dwells on a plane far above their region. But persons in earth-life
who dapple in things physical, before they understand the first principles
of psychic science, often find themselves on the lower planes of the Astral