Page:The Invisible World About Us - Rogers.pdf/12

 of remorse, or the suffering caused by the sudden loss of a very dear friend. Strong but ungratified desire may also be a source of suffering, as may easily be seen in the case of a hard drinker being unable to satisfy his insatiable thirst. This must be equally true, in varying degree, of all other material desires which people carry with them into the astral life, where there is no possibility of their gratification.

The astral region has seven subdivisions, and these form three groups or states of consciousness to which people go after death, and our location there depends upon the sort of life we lived here; not that we are sorted out and assigned to different regions, like the guests at a hotel are sent to various floors, but that our life here is constantly drawing into our bodies finer or coarser astral matter, and this determines with absolute accuracy our astral career. If, for example, a man lives a very low and bestial, or a very selfish life, he is thereby constantly attracting into his astral body the grossest grade of astral matter, and the preponderance of this matter will carry him to that most undesirable sub-plane of our world, the lower astral region, as certainly as a gross impulse here will take him where it may be gratified. This lowest sub-division of the astral world is described by trained occult observers as appearing devoid of all that is light and beautiful. One investigator describes it as having an atmosphere of grossness and loathsomeness that gives one the sensation of being surrounded by some black, viscous fluid, instead of by pure air. This is that subdivision of the astral world that is undoubtedly the basis of the descriptions in Biblical literature as purgatory or hell.

It is the next rarer region of the astral plane to which the bulk of humanity goes at death, and here the sojourn may be long or short. It will depend wholly upon circumstances, 11