Echoes From The Orient: A Broad Outline of Theosophical DoctrinesJudge, William Quan
Religion
Echoes From The Orient: A Broad Outline of Theosophical Doctrines
Judge, William Quan
Theosophy
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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