It may be imagined that the gross terrestrial body—though splendidly necessary for the localizing of the Self, and the establishment of the sense of identity, and for the electric accumulation of stores of emotion and passion, and so forth—acts on the whole in such a way as to greatly hamper and limit the activities of the inner body; and we can imagine that (as at death and under other special conditions) the liberation from the gross body is naturally accompanied by an enormous extension of faculty. The soul in its new and subtler form passes out into an immensely wider sphere of action and perception—so much so, indeed, as to make direct converse between the two worlds (the new world it is in, and the old one it has left) difficult to establish and very difficult permanently to maintain. The author of _Interwoven_ says (p. 221) that the first body and the second body differ greatly in their chemical particles, “and so the same degree of sight and hearing is not possible.... _We_ have just as much trouble to see the outsides of things as mortals have to see the insides.” Nor can we place a necessary limit to the birth of finer bodies. There may be a succession of such things. The electron brings us very near to a _mental_ state; for whereas an Atom—conceived as similar to the speck of dust which one can roll between one’s fingers, only much more minute—seems to have no relation to mentality, a tiny electric charge, capable of conveying a _shock_, comes very close! And at that stage the truth becomes apparent that the inner intelligent being in all things is the core, and the body is only the surface of contact—the surface, in fact, along which one intelligence administers shocks to another! With liberation from the gross body that surface may grow enormously extended, and it may become possible to _touch_ or _see_, or to render oneself visible or tangible, to others far beyond all ordinary possibilities of contact or perception. The succession of finer bodies may exist in any gradation, from what we call gross matter to the subtlest ether of emotion. At any rate we can see that at every stage there will be a finer body which is _more_ of the nature of thought, and an outer and coarser which is less so. As the gifted author of _The Science of Peace_, Bhagavan Das, says:—“At each stage the Jiva-core (_i.e._ the core of the living individual) consists of matter of the inner plane, while its outer upâdhi (or sheath) consists of matter of the outer plane; and when a person says, I think, I act, it means that the matter of the inner core, which is the I, for the time being, is actually, positively, modified by, or is itself modifying in a certain manner, the outer real world.” The inner film of matter (or mind), as he says, “is posing and masquerading, for the time being, as the truly immaterial self.”