Page:The Invisible World About Us - Rogers.pdf/9

 a thick mitten. The four fingers are now one. The hand is a clumsy club, and the once divine harmony would be but meaningless sound. And so, limited and confined as we are in dense matter, the soul is showing forth in this visible life, but the merest fragment of the real self.

Clearly, the physical body is not the man. If it were, the loss of a part of the body would logically be a loss of part of the man. But we know he may lose both arms and both lower limbs, the sight of both eyes, the hearing, the major part of the lungs and the entire stomach, and still live his allotted time. With so little of the physical body left he is the same man, with all the force of will and power of thought, with all the attributes of character that constitute a human being. This mere fragment of a body is sufficient for the real man to function through in the visible world. Of course, there is a point beyond which the mutilation of the physical organism cannot go without forcing the ego to abandon it; but every forward step in surgery is demonstrating more and more clearly that the body is but a wonderful machine and laboratory operated by a still more wonderful and independent intelligence.

What we call death is but the shifting of the life and consciousness from the physical to the astral body. It does not necessarily mean any movement in space, for the astral is here as much as the air and ether. How often one who dies by dropping off in unconscious slumber is not at first aware of it. He sees his surroundings much as before. He sees and speaks to his friends, and it is only when they do not answer, and take no notice of him, that he begins to realize that something unusual has occurred. He does not really see us as we see each other, but sees our astral bodies.

There is a mistaken idea that the astral world is 8