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"WHY DID EVERYTHING look so vague?" I asked, "and feel sowet; that’s the only word I can think of to describe it"

I’d been in the densest part of the earth’s aura he told ion which was the source of myths about the waters of Lethe, the River Styx

Why hadn’t I been able to see anything beyond ten feet after I died? Because I’d seen no further than that when I was dying and carried that last iish and stupid, unable to think clearly? Because two-thirds of my consciousness had been inoperative, my mind still enveloped by etheric ly, my responses had been confined to the instinctive and repetitive reactions of that matter I’d felt dull-witted, miserable, lonely, fearful

"And exhausted," I said "I kept wanting to sleep but I couldn’t"

"You were trying to reach your second death," Albert told me

Onceand per the mind to re-experience its life on earth, he told rief andmyself in that "approximately three days" I’d been held captive in a "sleepwalking" state

The fact is, Robert, that a person newly deceased is in exactly the frame of mind he was at the moment of death, accessible to influences from the earth plane This condition fades in sleep but, in ht state This was complicated further by Perry’s influence

"I know Richard only reed "He wanted to convince your wife that you’d survived; an act of love on his part But, in doing so, he ithout knowing it, instru further your second death"

"I still don’t knohat youof your etheric double," he said "Leaving the shell of it behind so your spirit--or astral--body could move on"

"Is that what I saw at the seance?" I asked in surprise, "my etheric double?"

"Yes, you’d discarded it by then"

"It was like a corpse," I said, with disgust

"It was a corpse," he told me "The corpse of your etheric double"

"But it spoke," I said "It answered questions" "Only as a zoone The astral shell, as it’s called, is no enuine life or intelligence The young man didn’t know it but it was his own psychic pohich animated the shell, his own mind which fed it answers"

"Like a puppet,’’ I said, recalling what I’d thought at the time