the result is that the molecules, having no model of leg to work on,
make no physical leg whatever; and similarly in all such cases. But
where we find a man who still feels the leg which the surgeon has cut
off, or perceives the fingers that were amputated, then the astral
member has not been interfered with, and hence the man feels as if it
were still on his person. For knife or acid will not injure the astral
model, but in the first stages of its growth ideas and imagination have
the power of acid and sharpened steel.
In the ordinary man who has not been trained in practical occultism or
who has not the faculty by birth, the astral body cannot go more than
a few feet from the physical one. It is a part of that physical, it
sustains it and is incorporated in it just as the fibres of the mango
are all through that fruit. But there are those who, by reason of
practices pursued in former lives on the earth, have a power born with
them of unconsciously sending out the astral body. These are mediums,
some seers, and many hysterical, cataleptic, and scrofulous people.
Those who have trained themselves by a long course of excessively hard
discipline which reaches to the moral and mental nature and quite
beyond the power of the average man of the day, can use the astral
form at will, for they have gotten completely over the delusion that
the physical body is a permanent part of them, and, besides, they have
learned the chemical and electrical laws governing in this matter. In
their case they act with knowledge and consciously; in the other cases
the act is done without power to prevent it, or to bring it about at
will, or to avoid the risks attendant on such use of potencies in
nature of a high character.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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