Course XXXVI - Teaching 4: Astral World

Every hour, thousands of souls leave their bodies in order to be at the hereafter, and while open graves swallow cold human images, remaining souls think and knock at the tomb, and anxiously ask: Where are they gone?
How distressing is death to those who believe that life is the result of forces and sensations, and that everything falls away when the latter stop their activities!
Even to those who have faith, death brings affliction, since those religions that subject them, only assure them an existence of life after death on condition of absolute submission to that creed.
Just a seer can easily soar to higher planes and know them.
In recent years, Spiritualism has made a considerable contribution, with certain valuable experiments, to demonstrate that after death a subtle part of the being subsists and enters another state of life. After first moments of unbalance, a being passes to a new state: the astral state. The first law he learns it the law of different gravitation, since he wishes to walk and cannot do; but as soon he thinks of walking, he walks so quickly as if he were flying. Here we do not follow the steps of quite evolved beings, but those of an ordinary being.
He finds his first troubles in the lower part of the astral world.
It is a world of strange colors, frightening images and moaning vibrations: a true Dante’s hell, with ethereal bodies of elementals, of spirits of Nature and of wild and insufficiently developed men. These beings or thought-forms collide continuously, produce bursts and change the aspect of the phantasmal picture as quickly as their gross sensations succeed to one other.
Certain people that believed in the existence of punishments after death believe they have reached that place of torment, and their distress is so great that they undergo a second death.
From there a being passes to the state of astral dream. This being has abandoned his ethereal body and the Invisible Protector leads him to forget and disappear all from his mind, so that he may ascend after a while to higher planes.
In spiritualistic seances, the habit of evoking the soul of a dead person that has entered this state becomes very harmful because when the thought evoking that being is very strong, he wakes up and attends to the place of this call and is seriously harmed and delayed in his spiritual progress.
This place of astral rest is so holy that neither high Entities can enter there; only those who are in charge of watching over the sleeping souls can enter there.
Surely it was a seer the Christian person that devised those images that are ornamenting cemeteries silent angels covering tombs with their wings, as if they wished to protect someone that is sleeping; and legends and prayers calling for retirement.
These beings, already purified, awaken to a new life, entirely forgetting their previous life. According to their level of evolution, they dwell on higher astral planes or on those of the mental world, along with beings that are in tune with them and have spiritually advanced more or less the same. Their thoughts create around them landscapes and objects constantly desired while they were still alive: their paradise. An artist finds his masterwork; an explorer, his dreamt land; a saint, his heaven; and a rebel, his kingdom. Every desire is satisfied but the germ of boredom is with satisfaction of desires.
So a soul starts dreaming of new things and eventually these gradual persistent dreams drive him toward a new life. It is a new ideal whose awakening will occur on the Earth.