There is also a useful function of this light. As it preserves the pictures of all past events and things, and as there is nothing new under the sun, the appliances, the ideas, the philosophy, the arts and sciences of long buried civilizations are continually being projected in pictures out of the astral into the brains of living men. This gives a meaning not only to the oft-recurring "coïncidence" of two or more inventors or scientists hitting upon the same ideas or inventions at about the same time and independently of each other, but also to other events and curious happenings.
Some self-styled scientists have spoken learnedly of telepathy, and other phenomena, but give no sufficient reason in nature for thought-transference or apparitions or clairvoyance or the hundred and one varieties of occurrences of an occult character noticed from day to day among all conditions of men. It is well to admit that thought may be transferred without speech directly from one brain to another, but how can the transference be effected without a medium? That medium is the astral light. The moment the thought takes shape in the brain it is pictured in this light, and from there is taken out again by any other brain sensitive enough to receive it intact.
Knowing the strange properties of the astral plane and the actual fate of the sheaths of the soul spoken of in another article, the Theosophical Adepts of all times gave no credit to pretended returning of the dead. Éliphas Lévi learned this well and said: "The astral light combining with ethereal fluids forms the astral phantom of which Paracelsus speaks. This astral body being freed at death, attracts to itself and preserves for a long time, by the sympathy of likeness, the reflection of the past life; if a powerfully sympathetic will draws it into the proper current it manifests itself in the form of an apparition." But with a sensitive, abnormally constituted person present—a medium, in other words, and all of that class are nervously unbalanced—the strong will is not needed, for the astral light and the living medium's astral body recall these soulless phantoms, and out of the same reservoir take their speech, their tones, their idiosyncrasies of character, which the deluded devotees of this debasing practice are cheated into imagining as the returned self of dead friend or relative.
Yet all I have referred to here are only instances of a few of the various properties of the astral light. So far as concerns our world it may be said that astral light is everywhere, interpenetrating all things; to have a photographic power by which it grasps pictures of thoughts, deeds, events, tones, sounds, colors, and all things; reflective in the sense that it reflects itself into the minds of men; repellant from its positive side and attractive from the negative; capable of assuming extreme density when drawn in around the body by powerful will or by abnormal bodily states, so that no physical force can penetrate it. This phase of its action explains some facts officially recorded during the witchcraft excitement in Salem. It was there found that although stones and other flying objects came toward the possessed one they always fell as it were from the force of gravity just at the person's feet. The Hindû Yogi gives evidence of a use of this condensation of the astral light when he allows arrows and other projectiles to be thrown at him, all of them falling at his feet no matter how great their momentum, and the records of genuine Spiritualistic phenomena in the United States furnish similar experiences.
The astral light is a powerful factor, unrecognized by science, in the phenomenon of hypnotism. Its action will explain many of the problems raised by Binet, Charcot and others, and especially that class in which two or more distinct personalities seem to be assumed by the subject, who can remember in each only those things and peculiarities of expression which belong to that particular stratum of their experience. These strange things are due to the currents in the astral light. In each current will be found a definite series of reflections, and they are taken up by the inner man, who reports them through speech and action on this plane as if they were his own. By the use of these currents too, but unconsciously, the clairvoyants and clairaudients seem to read in the hidden pages of life.
This light can therefore be impressed with evil or good pictures, and these are reflected into the subconscious mind of every human being. If you fill the astral light with bad pictures, just such as the present century is adept at creating, it will be our devil and destroyer, but if by the example of even a few good men and women a new and purer sort of events are limned upon this eternal canvas, it will become our Divine Uplifter.
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There is no Religion Higher than Truth