• Flatfooted materialists who can sense only this world become "earthbound spirits" after death, living in the etheric body.

• Those who are "dead" but living in the etheric body are seen as "ghosts", "apparitions", "phantoms", "doubles". These can be seen by the physical eyes or sensed psychically. They still live on the etheric-physical subplanes.

• The "dead" sometimes live in their astral bodies on the sixth and fifth subplanes of the Astral World. They cannot be seen. They live wholly in the Astral World and are often called "the spirits of the ancestors" or "dead relatives". Like the earthbound spirits mentioned above, they do not know that they are dead or refuse to recognize the fact.

• Elementals are attracted to seances and psychic phenomena. These subhuman entities are on the same level as animals, and are commonly called "devils".

• On the Astral Plane, you plant flowers by thought-seeds and they grow.

• There are people whose job it is to look after animals on the Astral Plane. Animals communicate by telepathy, which humans can clearly understand. On the Astral Plane, wild animals are tame.

Astral Plane Living Conditions

• When entering the Astral World after death, humans at first speak normally. Later, they adapt to telepathy.

• People tend to gather together on the Astral Plane according to their affections. Husbands and wives who did not get along in earth-life separate and live with others whom they feel drawn to. Generally, people live only with those whose thoughts are harmonious with theirs.

• People can form new relationships on the Astral Plane, but they do not have children. They can have astral sex, which is a co-mingling of the astral bodies, and they can be a thousand times happier in their relationships than on the Physical Plane. Children can be produced only on the Physical Plane, however; hence the importance of the physical body.

• After death, the personality lives in his astral body, but the astral body is not quite the same as during his earthly life. During his physical life, the astral body is always in motion; the astral matter is freely circulating in the astral body due to the continually changing moods, desires, and feelings. After death, however, the intelligence within the astral body rearranges the matter of the astral body so that the coarsest substance is on the surface and the finest substance is on the inside. This prevents the free circulation of astral matter, and the personality can respond only to those vibrations corresponding to the coarsest, outermost layer of his astral body. This means that those men and women who were evil or violent in their physical life can experience only such low vibrations that they live in a veritable hell world. In others, the lowest vibration equates with purgatory. In time, the outermost layer of the astral body disintegrates, enabling the personality to rise to the next level of the Astral World, and later on, to still higher subplanes. This "rising" up the subplanes is not a movement in space, but a movement in awareness or consciousness through a more purified astral body.

• One of the most important facts about the after-death life to understand is that a person does not change suddenly after he or she casts off the physical body, and become an Angel, a Master, a Saint, or a Wise Guide. This explains why the "messages" coming through clairvoyance, as practiced by spiritualists, are so utterly mundane, trivial, and inconsequential. The "dead" person retains the same intellect, emotions, mental habits, and speech patterns, and the same knowledge or lack of it.

• Hell, purgatory, and heaven are not localities, but states of consciousness. They are the result of one's sum total of feelings, thoughts, and desires projected into the astral life after death. In the after-death states, there are just as many varieties of intellect and intelligence as there are down here in this world.

• The after-death life is not a new life, but is already coexisting simultaneously with this bodily life. It may, in fact, be viewed as the other side of this life.

• When they die, most ordinary people find it difficult to believe that they are dead, because they can still think, feel, hear, see, taste, and touch. But now they are using astral senses instead of physical senses.

• The Astral Plane interpenetrates the Physical Plane, but the vibrations of matter in the two worlds differ so widely that beings living in the two worlds in the same space are unconscious of each other's existence.

• The curious fact is that to the average "dead" person, even the Astral Plane is invisible; he or she sees and hears only that subplane which resonates with the outermost layer of his or her astral body. Thus, two people standing next to each another on the Astral Plane, but vibrating at differing rates, are to all practical purposes on a different subplane of the Astral World, and are unable to perceive each other. Only those people in whom the astral body is not rearranged, but remains free-flowing, can perceive the Astral World as it really is.

• The experience of "hell", as described by thousands of people and by all world religions, is real. The darkness, the loneliness, the feelings of despair or desolation, as well as the hell-fire and the pit, are real to those who experience it. All the terrors of hell are real. They are the mental and emotional products of the sufferer, not a punishment by a vindictive, cruel deity. Hell is quite literally a product of the sufferer's mind, as is the "heaven" of a more saintly person. Neither of them is eternal. Because time does not exist on the Astral Plane, even a brief experience of these mental states appears to be eternal.