In the astral body are all the centres of your
senses. You know how after death a man's desires are the same as they
were during his physical life. You know how in dreams your desires
resemble desires that you may have in your waking consciousness. The
centre of all your psychic powers, of your conscious powers, the
centres of these are in the astral, and if (especially with your
senses, each of which has its own centre in the astral body) you
overstrain the physical senses down here, you will get an action on
the astral plane, but an unhealthy, because disorderly one, one not
going along the line of evolution but trying to create from below
instead of from above. None the less, you may have some results, and
in the two famous Indian systems for developing the powers of the
consciousness, and for unfolding the consciousness itself, you have
this recognised, and you read of Râja Yoga and of Hatha Yoga, of the
Kingly Yoga and of the Yoga of Effort. The Yoga of Effort is Hatha
Yoga, and is practised by physical means and followed by physical
effects. The eye is stimulated in certain ways, and the effect of
straining the physical eye is to bring about a certain limited kind of
clairvoyance. You can gain it in that way by gazing into crystals, and
so on. They do stimulate the centre of physical sight, but not the
astral; and that is why they cannot go very far. You can get a certain
amount of clairvoyance by these means, but you are only expanding your
physical sight, and working on centres of the astral body connected
with the physical organ of vision, the eye. The true astral sight is
an entirely different thing. That comes from a centre of its own in
the astral body. It has to be created from the mental body, as the
organ of the physical was from the astral. The centre of that sight
will be in the mental body and not in the astral, and only the organ
of it in the astral body. The method of the Kingly, the Râja Yoga, is
always by thought--concentrate, meditate, contemplate, think: by that
means, in a healthy, normal, natural way you will inevitably develop
the powers of sight on the astral, as in the course of Nature the
powers of sight were developed on the physical plane. And if you
realise that your consciousness is one, building its bodies for its
fuller and more complete expression, that you are here in order to
become masters of matter instead of its slaves, to become lords of
matter, using every organ of matter for knowledge of the world to
which that matter belongs, and not to be blinded by it, as we are for
so long a time in our climb upwards, then you will see that this
natural development of astral powers is inevitable in the course of
evolution, and all that you can do is to quicken it, following the
line which Nature has traced. As Nature slowly will evolve in every
human being the power of using the astral body as freely as you use
the physical body now, so can you quicken the coming of that day for
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