Clairvoyance and Occult Powers

by William Walker Atkinson

The heat from a stove will be felt in a room long after the stove has been removed from it. A room will long contain the odor of something that has been removed from it. It is said that in one of the old mosques of Persia there may be perceived the faint odor of the musk that was exposed there hundreds of years ago—the very walls are saturated with the pungent odor. Again, is it not wonderful that our memories preserve the images of the sounds and forms which were placed there perhaps fifty years and more ago? How do these memory images survive and exist? Though we may have thought of the past thing for half a lifetime, yet, suddenly its image flashes into our consciousness. Surely this is as wonderful as the Akashic Records, though its "commonness" makes it lose its wonderful appearance to us.

Camille Flammarion, the eminent French astronomer, in a book written over twenty-five years ago, and which is now out of print, I believe, pictured a possible condition of affairs in which a disembodied soul would be able to perceive events that happened in the past, by simply taking a position in space in which he would be able to catch the light-waves that emanated from a distant planet at that particular time in the past the happenings of which he wanted to perceive. The little book was called "Lumen"—I advise you to read it, if you can find it in your public libraries.

Another writer has written somewhat along the same lines. I herewith give you a quotation from him, that you may get the idea he wishes to express—it will help you in your conception of the Akashic Records. He says: "When we see anything, whether it be the book we hold in our hands, or a star millions of miles away, we do so by means of a vibration in the ether, commonly called a ray of light, which passes from the object seen to our eyes. Now the speed with which this vibration passes is so great—about 186,000 miles in a second—that when we are considering any object in our own world we may regard it as practically instantaneous. When, however, we come to deal with interplanetary distances we have to take the speed of light into consideration, for an appreciable period is occupied in traversing these vast spaces. For example, it takes eight minutes and a quarter for light to travel to us from the sun, so that when we look at the solar orb we see it by means of a ray of light which left it more than eight minutes ago. From this follows a very curious result. The ray of light by which we see the sun can obviously report to us only the state of affairs' which existed in that luminary when it started on its journey, and would not be in the least affected by anything that happened after it left; so that we really see the sun not as it is, but as it was eight minutes ago. That is to say that if anything important took place in the sun—the formation of a new sun-spot, for instance—an astronomer who was watching the orb through his telescope at the time would be unaware of the incident while it was happening, since the ray of light bearing the news would not reach him until more than eight minutes later.

"The difference is more striking when we consider the fixed stars, because in their case the distances are so enormously greater. The pole star, for example, is so far off that light, traveling at the inconceivable speed above mentioned, takes a little more than fifty years to reach our eyes; and from that follows the strange but inevitable inference that we see the pole star not as or where it is at this moment, but as and where it was fifty years ago. Nay, if tomorrow some cosmic catastrophe were to shatter the pole star into fragments, we should still see it peacefully shining in the sky all the rest of our lives; our children would grow up to middle-age and gather their children about them in turn before the news of that tremendous accident reached any terrestial eye. In the same way there are other stars so far distant that light takes thousands of years to travel from them to us, and with reference to their condition our information is therefore thousands of years behind time. Now carry the argument a step farther. Suppose that we were able to place a man at the distance of 186,000 miles from the earth, and yet to endow him with the wonderful faculty of being able from that distance to see what was happening here as clearly as though he were still close beside us. It is evident that a man so placed would see everything a second after the time it really happened, and so at the present moment he would be seeing what happened a second ago. Double that distance, and he would be two seconds behind time, and so on; remove him to the distance of the sun (still allowing him to preserve the same mysterious power of sight) and he would look down and watch you doing not what you are doing now, but what you were doing eight minutes and a quarter ago. Carry him to the pole star, and he would see passing before his eyes the events of fifty years ago; he would be watching the childish gambols of those who at the same moment were really middle-aged men. Marvellous as this may sound, it is literally and scientifically true, and cannot be denied."

Flammarion, in his story, called "Lumen," makes his spirit hero pass at will along the ray of light from the earth, seeing the things of different eras of earth-time. He even made him travel backward along that ray, thus seeing the happenings in reverse order, as in a moving picture running backward. This story is of the greatest interest to the occultist, for while the Akashic Records are not the same as the light records, yet the analogy is so marked in many ways that the occultist sees here another exemplification of the old occult axiom that "as above, so below; as below, so above."

I take the liberty of quoting here from my little book, "The Astral World," in order to give you some further idea of the nature of these records in the Astral Light. The reader is supposed to be travelling in his astral body, having the phenomena of the astral pointed out to him by a competent occultist acting as his guide. The occultist-guide says to the student: "Changing our vibrations, we find ourselves entering a strange region, the nature of which you at first fail to discern. Pausing a moment until your astral vision becomes attuned to the peculiar vibrations of this region, you will find that you are becoming gradually aware of what may be called an immense picture gallery, spreading out in all directions, and apparently bearing a direct relation to every point of space on the surface of the earth. At first, you find it difficult to decipher the meaning of this great array of pictures. The trouble arises from the fact that they are arranged not one after the other in sequence on a flat plane; but rather in sequence, one after another, in a peculiar order which may be called the order of 'X-ness in space,' because it is neither the dimension of length, breadth, or depth—it is practically the order of the fourth dimension in space, which cannot be described in terms of ordinary spatial dimension. Again, you find upon closely examining the pictures that they are very minute—practically microscopic in size—and require the use of the peculiar magnifying power of astral vision to bring them up to a size capable of being recognized by your faculty of visual recognition.

"The astral vision, when developed, is capable of magnifying any object, material or astral, to an enormous degree—for instance, the trained occultist is able to perceive the whirling atoms and corpuscles of matter, by means of this peculiarity of astral vision. Likewise, he is able to plainly perceive many fine vibrations of light which are invisible to the ordinary sight. In fact, the peculiar Astral Light which pervades this region is due to the power of the astral vision to perceive and register these fine vibrations of light. Bring this power of magnifying into operation, and you will see that each of the little points and details of the great world picture so spread before you in the Astral Light is really a complete scene of a certain place on earth, at a certain period in the history of the earth. It resembles one of the small views in a series of moving pictures—a single view of a roll-film. It is fixed, and not in motion, and yet we can move forward along the fourth dimension, and thus obtain a moving picture of the history of any point on the surface of the earth, or even combine the various points into a large moving picture, in the same way. Let us prove this by actual experiment. Close your eyes for a moment, while we travel back in time (so to speak) along the series of these astral records—for, indeed, they travel back to the beginning of the history of the earth. Now open your eyes! Looking around you, you perceive the pictured representation of strange scenes filled with persons wearing a peculiar garb—but all is still, no life, no motion.

"Now, let us move forward in time, at much higher rate than that in which the astral views were registered. You now see flying before you the great movement of life on a certain point of space, in a far distant age. From birth to death you see the life of these strange people, all in the space of a few moments. Great battles are fought, and cities rise before your eyes, all in a great moving picture flying at a tremendous speed. Now stop, and then let us move backward in time, still gazing at the moving pictures. You see a strange sight, like that of 'reversing the film' in a moving picture. You see everything moving backward—cities crumbling into nothingness, men arising from their graves, and growing younger each second until they are finally born as babes—everything moving backward in time, instead of forward. You can thus witness any great historical event, or follow the career of any great personage from birth to death—or backward. You will notice, moreover, that everything is semi-transparent, and that accordingly you can see the picture of what is going on inside of buildings as well as outside of them. Nothing escapes the Astral Light Records. Nothing can be concealed from it. By traveling to any point in time, on the fourth dimension, you may begin at that point, and see a moving picture of the history of any part of the earth from that time to the present—or you may reverse the sequence by travelling backward, as we have seen. You may also travel in the Astral, on ordinary space dimensions, and thus see what happened simultaneously all over the earth, at any special moment of past-time, if you wish."

Now, I do not for a moment wish you to understand that the above experience is possible to every clairvoyant who is able to sense past-time events and happenings. On the contrary, the above experience is possible only to the advanced occultist, or to the student whom he may take with him on an astral trip, in the astral body. The clairvoyant merely catches glimpses of certain phases and fields of the great astral record region or state. For that matter, the ordinary clairvoyant merely sees a reflection of the true Astral-Light pictures—a reflection similar to that of a landscape reflected in a pond. Moreover, this reflection may be (and frequently is) disturbed as if by the ripples and waves of the pond in which the landscape is reflected. But, still, even the ordinary clairvoyant is able to secure results which are wonderful enough in all truth, and which far transcend the power of the person functioning on the physical plane alone.

Past-time clairvoyance is frequently induced by means of psychometry, in which the clairvoyant is able to have "the loose end" to unwind the ball of time. But, still, in some cases the clairvoyant is able to get en rapport with the astral records of past-time by the ordinary methods of meditation, etc. The main obstacle in the last mentioned case is the difficulty of coming in contact with the exact period of past-time sought for—in psychometry, the vibrations of the "associated object" supplies the missing-link.