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
Let us turn to Science, and see how far similar doors are opening there
for the science of our day. You may remember that I pointed out to you
that science was now rather at its wits’ end as regards observation. It
seems to have reached the limit of the delicacy of its outer apparatus.
How shall it continue to observe? By means of those same senses that
I have been speaking of in relation to the verification of religious
teachings, but in science you can begin a little lower down. In the
physical world of matter, our own world, science is now recognising not
only solid, liquid, gas, but also ether, and beyond ether, possible
finenesses arising, so that there may be many ethers, as indeed was
suggested in that famous classification of vibrations which Sir William
Crookes gave in one of his addresses a few years ago. Let it stand for
the moment as a matter of observation of higher sight that there are
more ethers than one that science will gradually conquer. But science
is not yet able to see even the chemical atom, and that is only on the
plane of the gas, the third fineness of matter. The atom escapes by its
subtlety, by its minuteness, and yet it would not be a very difficult
thing for most of you to develop in yourselves the power of seeing as
far as that, for it is only physical matter. It is not now the seeing
of another kind of matter altogether, like that of the astral world; it
is only the making a little keener of your present physical sight. Now
I wonder how many of you, if you were on board ship, quiet, with the
air very pure, if you looked into the atmosphere around you, would see
dancing in that atmosphere a number of tiny brilliant sparks. Probably a
large number of you. Try it next time you happen to be out on the sea.
Sit with your back to the sun, otherwise your eyes will become dazzled;
fix your gaze at the distance at which you can see an object clearly, so
as not to strain the eyes; focus your eyes, say at a distance of four or
five yards away, not near enough to cause any strain by the crossing of
the eyes; you must not cross the axes of the eyes, that is, you must not
squint; that, prolonged, will injure the eyes. Let them look quite easily
out a few yards away from you into the empty air, and stay quite quietly
looking at that point. Probably most of you presently would begin to see
a number of brilliant little sparks dancing like motes in a sunbeam.
One word of warning I must give you: if, in fixing your attention on
one of those, it slowly glides away out of sight, round the corner as
it were, then it is only something in the retina, and the humour of the
eyes carries that gradually away; anything that gradually slides out
of sight belongs to the physical retina of the eye, and is not outside
yourself. But if they dance up and down in every direction, exactly as
the dust in a ray of light coming through a shutter, then you may be sure
that you are seeing something in the air beyond your ordinary vision.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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