Page:The Invisible World About Us - Rogers.pdf/7

 But on this point we are in the grip of the same sort of delusion that leads us to see the earth as the center the universe, with the sun and stars moving about it. If we could be transported to the sun, and from there behold the earth as the mote it would comparatively be, that delusion about their relative size and movement would instantly vanish. Precisely so would this illusion about the importance of the physical plane, with its material affairs, vanish if viewed from the mental region. Indeed, so very illusory is this physical life that the advanced occultist speaks of the physical body as "a shadow" of the real self. As we move toward the mental region we approach reality.

Let us think, then, of the conscious being, the living, thinking soul, as beginning its journey for another cycle of experience in the highest or rarest portion of the realm we have called the mental region. Its desire for experience generates energy. It draws to itself the unimaginably rare matter of the mental region somewhat as a magnet attracts iron filings, and as these minute iron particles arrange themselves about the magnet in perfect order, obeying the laws of vibration with the same accuracy that the earth moves in its orbit, so does this mental matter form the mental body about the soul. This accomplished, the soul continues its descent into matter, the astral body being the next acquisition.

But we must not be misled by the phrase "descent into matter," or by the expression, "from higher down to lower regions." There is no higher or lower in the sense of altitude. The mental region is not further away than the astral. Both are as much here, within reach of the hand, as the physical. We must not forget that the matter of both interpenetrates all physical matter, and also completely envelopes it. So the soul, or consciousness, does not come down from 6