Someone has asked if the mental plane has mountains, rivers, cities and people? It has. As above so below (but slightly different sometimes). Mountains exist but they are somehow far away and difficult to reach, rivers are transparent, cities are both modern and old, sometimes huge, but usually with a very few people and other spirits living, compared to our world’s reality.
For me it is easy to make a difference between the etheric plane (or how Bardon calls it lower astral plane) and astral plane. But to make a difference between the higher astral plane and the mental plane is more difficult. It is not easy to communicate with spirits in the mental plane. They have their own ways which are often not comparable to ours. Many spirits are not human (and if we take only that reason, no wonder that is not easy to understand them), but if they also live in the mental plane, than they are even more difficult to understand.
There are also different levels of mental planes. Some are paradise-like, others are hardly so. It is not that mental realm is better than astral only because it is higher. Duality exists everywhere, so some very strange, and to us humans, maybe bizarre things, can happen in the mental plane. Every planet has its its own mental realms. Cabalistically speaking they are governed by archangels and H (the second letter of YHVH).
Mental plane is not to be confused with AKASHA.
AKASHA is higher. It is associated with the spiritual realm, but that is where eternity is…It is something completely different than the mental realm