The dense body is the physical body, the visible, tangible outer form, composed of various
tissues. The etheric double is the ethereal counterpart of the body, composed of the physical
ethers. Prâna is vitality, the integrating energy that co-ordinates the physical molecules and holds
them together in a definite organism; it is the life-breath within the organism, the portion of the
universal Life-Breath, appropriated by the organism during the span of existence that we speak
of as "a life".
The human body is constantly undergoing a process of decay and of reconstruction. First builded
into the etheric form in the womb of the mother, it is built up continually by the insetting of fresh
materials. With every moment tiny molecules are passing away from it; with every moment tiny
molecules are streaming into it.
Death consists, indeed, in a repeated process of unrobing, or unsheathing. The immortal part of
man shakes off from itself, one after the other, its outer casings, and—as the snake from its skin,
the butterfly from its chrysalis—emerges from one after another, passing into a higher state of
consciousness. Now it is the fact that this escape from the body, and this dwelling of the
conscious entity either in the vehicle called the body of desire, the kâmic or astral body, or in
a yet more ethereal Thought Body, can be effected during earth-life; so that man may become
familiar with the excarnated condition, and it may lose for him all the terrors that encircle the
unknown. He can know himself as a conscious entity in either of these vehicles, and so prove to
his own satisfaction that "life" does not depend on his functioning through the physical body.
Man is primarily divine, a spark of the Divine Life. So when Death unlocks the door for him, he knows the country into
which he emerges, having trodden its ways at his own will. And at last he grows to recognize
that fact of supreme importance, that "Life" has nothing to do with body and with this material
plane; that Life is his conscious existence, unbroken, unbreakable, and that the brief interludes in
that Life, during which he sojourns on Earth, are but a minute fraction of his conscious
existence.
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