Page:The Invisible World About Us - Rogers.pdf/13

 precisely as the length of the physical life depends upon many things, including the soundness of our physical body, the care we take of it and the manner in which we live. Some may remain on the astral plane a very short time, and others for a long period. But in general it may be said that in the same way we reckon an ordinary physical life as sixty or seventy years, the astral life may be put at twenty-five or thirty years.

This astral region, as a whole, is the world of desires, passions and emotions. During physical life we have generated certain forces that have not had their full expression, and this stored-up energy must work itself out on the invisible planes. It may thus happen that, although a man who dies has no physical body through which he can suffer, he passes through a purgative process that we should as earnestly seek to avoid as we would seek to avoid burns and bruises, regrets and heartaches here. All evil and selfish thoughts and acts indulged here must necessarily cause more or less suffering in the astral world. All hatred, envy, jealousy, anger and all gross desires and appetites indulged here must inevitably work out unpleasantly there.

On the other hand, those who have lived clean, wholesome and unselfish lives here pass quickly to the loftiest conditions of the astral world, and for the simple reason that they have been unconsciously all the time attracting the rarest grade of astral matter to their astral bodies until it predominates. That like attracts like is one of the fundamental principles of nature.

When the astral life is finished—that is to say, when the forces that carry us to the astral plane are exhausted—we pass into the mental region, or heaven world, which is the second great division of the invisible world about us. Again 12