The changing world, and lectures to theosophical students.: Fifteen lectures delivered in London during May, June, and July, 1909Besant, Annie
Religion
The changing world, and lectures to theosophical students.: Fifteen lectures delivered in London during May, June, and July, 1909
Besant, Annie
Theosophy; Theosophy -- Study and teaching
First: the students in question are in course of evolution, and the
faculties of which they make use to-day, which have become their normal
faculties, are more developed and reach higher planes than those which
they used ten or fifteen years ago. Hence they see now very much more
than they saw then, both in quantity and quality, and this enlarged
sight must inevitably give reports differing in fulness from that of the
earlier and narrower vision.
Secondly: this greater fulness will change relative proportions and
perspective. A thing which seemed imposing and independent when seen
alone, may become subordinate and comparatively insignificant when seen
as a part of a larger whole. It may change form and colour, seen with
surroundings which become visible only when it is looked at with a higher
vision. That which was a globe, sailing through space, to the physical
eye, becomes the free end of a continuous body, materially attached to
the sun, when seen with superphysical sight. Was it false to describe it
a globe? Yes, and no.
It was and is a globe on the physical plane, answering to all that is
meant by a globe down here. In subtler regions it is not a globe, but a
body, the tip of which is a globe only to gross vision, vision to which
its continuation is invisible.
Thirdly: the keener vision detects intermediate stages before unseen, and
shows a series of changes between two which, to the less acute sight,
were in immediate sequence. Thus, in the earlier observations, it was
said that the ultimate physical atom broke up into astral matter. When
a similar phenomenon is studied twelve years later, it is seen that the
physical atom breaks up into an immense number of inconceivably minute
particles, and that these immediately group themselves into forty-nine
astral atoms, which may or may not, again, combine into astral molecules.
Again, a whirling wall was mentioned: keener vision sees no wall, but an
illusory enclosure, caused by rapid motion, like the fiery circle traced
by a whirling fire-tipped stick. So, in the continuous light of gas or
electricity, a whirling disk of black and white rays shows grey; put out
the lights, and let the darkness be rent by a lightning-flash, the disk
hangs motionless, every black and white ray distinct. Which is the true
observation? The eye in each case bears true witness to what it _sees_.
The different conditions impose upon it different visions.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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