And with what body does he come?

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting—

The soul that rises with us, our life’s star,

Hath had elsewhere its setting,

And cometh from afar—

Not in entire forgetfulness,

And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come

To God, who is our home.

Your birth into the new life differs at almost every point from your birth into the earthly. 

You owe your earthly body to others—your psychic body to yourself. 

That is, the state of development in which you arrive in the world of spirits depends greatly on your past life—you are born here, as an infant, child or a mature being, according to the past life and the present state of the true self. 

Your psychic body is being formed within the earthly during your earthly life, but the materials of which it is composed are not earthly, but are finer, rarer, though still material and capable of an outward manifestation of the psychic vision. 

The clay out of which the Spirit of Life creates your new body is not the old red earth, not the old Adam, but is like unto the resurrection body of the Master—a body, which could not see corruption, and which the grave could not hold, though it might be guarded ever so closely.

The psyche then, when it has quitted the earthly tenement, appears immediately and suddenly in this—

Just as you see a man when he emerges from his house—a moment ago, he was invisible to you, and now, he is completely visible. So it is here—the body, which is the only part of a man visible to our eyes is the part that is invisible to spirits, and hides him from them. Sometimes, he appears for a moment here, shadowy and unreal, more like a vision, then disappears again for a while. 

This is when the soul is loth to leave the body, and lingers near it.

When the time arrives for the psyche to quit the earthly plane and leave its earthly covering behind it, then, the link, which unites it to the physical, is broken. 

This link partakes of the two natures, and the only pain and struggle connected with this passing is when the soul is unwilling to lose its hold on the earthly—or fears to do so. Then, a moment of unconsciousness supervenes—a time of longer or shorter duration, according to circumstances. 

The psychical does not generally quit the body immediately, but slowly withdraws itself, and then only, the body gradually decays and disintegrates—the lower forms of life escape to reincarnate themselves in some other form while there must always be a certain degree of life abiding in each atom, for without it, they would have no existence.

So the spirit of the animal goes downward, remaining in the earthly sphere, and the spirit of the man goes upward, entering into the higher life.

We now have the man, divested of his lower form, ready to enter into the intermediate state. 

And with what body does he come? 

With one that closely resembles the earthly one, very closely indeed at first, but with powers unfolded within it that far transcend the old ones though those powers are yet more or less dormant. 

The man is still far from being a pure spirit—he bears a form like the Master’s—a form, which is in four dimensions and which cannot be seen by ordinary earthly vision. 

The old body is the matrix in which the new man is formed, and from which by the pangs of death he is parted to enter into his second life. 

Now how does he appear on the other side? 

Spirit-eyes do not see the physical, which you always must bear in mind. 

What they see of the earthly is only the soul-image reflected in some medium. 

After this uncovering, the newborn spirit-life awakes and finds himself in a state that seems to him, at first, but the same to which he has been accustomed—He continues, as he thinks, his old life until the fact gradually dawns upon him that the great change has taken place and that he has passed from death unto life.