Life in the lower stages of the next world duplicate in every detail our lives on earth.

"The next stage of life to earth is a replica of your world of matter," declared Silver Birch. "Were it no so, the shock for the many who are uninstructed and ignorant would be more than they could stand. And so it has to be accomplished by very easy stages. The next stage of life resembles your world. That is why so many do not know that they have passed beyond the physical.

"Here esentially it is a world of thought, where thought is reality. And, being a thought world, thought moulds every expression of its life and its activity. Being so near to your world, and peopled by men and women who are naturally still very material in their outlook on life, the expression of the thought is very gross and so, whatever they think is in terms of physical things.

"They cannot think of life apart from its physical aspects. There has never filtered into their consciousness any understanding of a life apart from the purely physical. They cannot visualise spiritual activities and, because they cannot visualise them, they have no place in their scheme of things. But there are degrees of astral life, for gradually as awakening comes the grossness slowly but surely becomes more refined. And life, they begin to see, is something beyond its material aspect. When spiritual realisation dawns they are dead to the astral world and they begin to live in the world of spirit. There are many deaths and many births."