Theos-Talk Archives (July 2005 Message tt00070)

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"Death is the laying aside of the physical body; but it makes no more difference to the ego than does the laying aside of an overcoat to the physical man. Having put off his physical body, the ego continues to live in his astral body until the force has become exhausted which has been generated by such emotions and passions as he has allowed himself to feel during earth life. When that has happened, the second death takes place; the astral body also falls away from him, and he finds himself living in the mental body andin the lower mental world. In that condition he remains until the thought forces generated during his physical and astral lives have worn themselves out; then he drops the third vehicle in its turn and remains once more an ego in his own world, inhabiting his causal body.
173. There is, then, no such thing as death as it is ordinarily understood. There is only a succession of stages in a continuous life – stages lived in the three worlds one after another. The apportionment of time between these three worlds varies much as man advances. The primitive man lives almost exclusively in the physical world, spending only a few years in the astral at the end of each of his physical lives. As he develops, the astral life becomes longer, and as intellect (Page 64) unfolds in him, and he becomes able to think, hebegins to spend a little time in the mental world as well. The ordinary man of civilized races remains longer in the mental world than in the physical and astral; indeed, the more a man evolves the longer becomes his mental life and the shorter his life in the astral world."

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