Is spirit made of matter?

Death has taken nothing from the laboratory of Nature―it simply takes up the elements that life has left and arranges for another form of life. Thus her resources are never exhausted. The equipoise is always maintained, the supply is equal to the demand, and nothing is either lost or gained in the world of material during all the cycles of time.

The wisest human in the world does not have the power of destroying a single element, but may change its form and displace the arrangement, for what is has been and always will be.

I hold in my hand a piece of wood―the elements constituting the wood are held in bondage and do not have the power of acting independently of each other. I cast the bit of wood into the flame and watch it being slowly consumed thereby. When this process is completed, have I destroyed the wood? As a piece of wood, yes, but the enslaved elements that constituted it are set free by the action of combustion, and they start out on a higher career than that which marked their former existence.

Destroyed? No! Changed, uplifted, set free? Yes!

From this example, it will be seen that through the Law of Evolution, death becomes a stepping-stone of life, and throughout all the physical universe these great processes have enabled this, and all other planets, to arrive at their present state of development, and will be the power whereby still mightier results will be obtained.

Remember that spirit is first―matter is only a means of its expression―

This planet, this material world is but the instrument in the hands of the spiritual world―every blade of grass, every singing bird and every human being is but an expression of the same forces, differing in degree of unfoldment, but through the action of the law of evolution forever creeps along the pathway of progress to the ultimate, which is but the turning point of a newer and greater destiny.

In human, we find the realisation of matter and spirit.

Without spirit, matter is expressionless and void, with spirit, it takes its place among the mighty realities of the world, guiding, shaping, and in influencing the destiny of all things and all persons that are responsive to it.

During the younger years of life, the spirit is gaining possession of its machine, during the latter years, they work in harmony with each other and the best work of life is accomplished between the years of twenty-five and fifty.

In that time, in most cases, the spirit has become responsive to higher attractions than the earth offers, and the subsequent years be they few or many are passed in the effort of the spirit to gradually relieve itself from physical environments, so as to take on the higher spiritual ones for which the experiences of life have finally fitted it, and when death comes it is simply the completion of a process, which has been going on for a long time.

Encyclopaedia of Death and Life in the Spirit World