People are always saying, “If I had my life to live over, I would do so and so.” Now, no man has any particular life to live over, any more than the heart can go back and beat over again the beat of the second previous; but every man has his next life to prepare for. Suppose you have made a botch of your existence. Most men have, viewed from the standpoint of their highest ideal; but every man who can think must have assimilated some experience which he can carry over with him. He may not, on coming out into the sunlight of another life on earth, be able to remember the details of his former experience, though some men can recall them by a sufficient training and a fixed will; but the tendencies of any given life, the unexplained impulses and desires, are in nearly all cases brought over. You should get away from the mental habit of regarding your present life as the only one, get rid of the idea that the life you expect to lead on this side, after your death, is to be an endless existence in one state. You could no more endure such an endless existence in the subtle matter of the inner world than you could endure to live forever in the gross matter in which you are now encased. You would weary of it. You could not support it. Do get this idea of rhythm into your brain. All beings are subject to the law of rhythm, even the gods,--though in a greater way than ourselves, with longer periods of flux and reflux. I did not want to leave the earth, I fought against it until the last; but now I see that my coming out was inevitable because of the conditions. Had I begun earlier I might have provisioned my craft for a longer cruise; but when the coal and water had run out I had to make port. It is possible to provision even a small life-craft for a longer voyage than the allotted threescore years and ten; but one must economise the coal and not waste the water. There are some who will understand that water is the fluid of life. Many persons resent the idea that the life after death is not eternal, a never-ending progression in spiritual realms; though few who so object have much of an idea what they mean when they talk of spiritual realms. Life everlasting is possible to all souls--yes; but it is not possible to go on forever in one direction. Evolution is a curve. Eternity is a circle, a serpent that swallows its own tail. Until you are willing to go in and out of dense matter, you will never learn to transcend matter. There are those who can stay in or out at will, and, relatively speaking, as long as they choose; but they are never those who shrink from either form of life. I used to shrink from what I called death. There are those on this side who shrink from what _they_ call death. Do you know what they call death? It is rebirth into the world. Yes, even so.