The Astral Plane: Its Scenery, Inhabitants and PhenomenaLeadbeater, C. W. (Charles Webster)
Religion
The Astral Plane: Its Scenery, Inhabitants and Phenomena
Leadbeater, C. W. (Charles Webster)
Astral body; Theosophy
nothing whatever to prevent black magicians from supplying
communicating "spirits"--as, indeed, they have been known to do.
With this class we conclude our survey of the inhabitants of the
astral plane. With the reservations specially made some few pages
back, the catalogue may be taken as a fairly complete one; but it must
once more be emphasized that this treatise claims only to sketch the
merest outline of a very vast subject, the detailed elaboration of
which would need a lifetime of study and hard work.
PHENOMENA.
Though in the course of this paper various superphysical phenomena
have been mentioned and to some extent explained, it will perhaps
before concluding be desirable so far to recapitulate as to give a
list of those which are most frequently met with by the student of
these subjects, and to show by which of the agencies we have attempted
to describe they are usually caused. The resources of the astral
world, however, are so varied that almost any phenomenon with which we
are acquainted can be produced in several different ways, so that it
is only possible to lay down general rules in the matter.
Apparitions or ghosts furnish a very good instance of the remark just
made, for in the loose manner in which the words are ordinarily used
they may stand for almost any inhabitant of the astral plane. Of
course psychically developed people are constantly seeing such things,
but for an ordinary person to "see a ghost," as the common expression
runs, one of two things must happen: either that ghost must
materialize, or that person must have a temporary flash of psychic
perception. But for the fact that neither of these events is a common
one, ghosts would be met with in our streets as frequently as living
people.
[Sidenote: Churchyard Ghosts.]
If the ghost is seen hovering about a grave it is probably the etheric
shell of a newly-buried person, though it _may_ be the astral body of
a living man haunting in sleep the tomb of a friend; or again, it may
be a materialized thought-form--that is, an artificial elemental
created by the energy with which a man thinks of himself as present at
that particular spot. These varieties would be easily distinguishable
one from the other by any one accustomed to use astral vision, but an
unpractised person would be quite likely to call them all vaguely
"ghosts".
[Sidenote: Apparitions of the Dying.]
Apparitions at the time of death are by no means uncommon, and are
very often really visits paid by the astral form of the dying man just
before what we elect to call the moment of dissolution; though here
again they are quite likely to be thought-forms called into being by
his earnest wish to see some friend once more before he passes into an
unfamiliar condition.
[Sidenote: Haunted Localities.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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