In this judgment of character our clairvoyant will be much helped by so much of the person's thought as expresses itself on the astral plane, and consequently comes within his purview. The true home of thought is on the mental plane, and all thought first manifests itself there as a vibration of the mind-body. But if it be in any way a selfish thought, or if it be connected in any way with an emotion or a desire, it immediately descends into the astral plane, and takes to itself a visible form of astral matter.

In the case of the majority of men almost all thought would fall under one or other of these heads, so that practically the whole of their personality would lie clearly before our friend's astral vision, since their astral bodies and the thought-forms constantly radiating from them would be to him as an open book in which their characteristics were writ so largely that he who ran might read. Anyone wishing to gain some idea as to _how_ the thought-forms present themselves to clairvoyant vision may satisfy themselves to some extent by examining the ill.u.s.trations accompanying Mrs. Besant's valuable article on the subject in _Lucifer_ for September 1896.

We have seen something of the alteration in the appearance of both animate and inanimate objects when viewed by one possessed of full clairvoyant sight as far as the astral plane is concerned; let us now consider what entirely new objects he will see. He will be conscious of a far greater fulness in nature in many directions, but chiefly his attention will be attracted by the living denizens of this new world.

No detailed account of them can be attempted within the s.p.a.ce at our disposal; for that the reader is referred to No. V. of the _Theosophical Manuals_. Here we can do no more than barely enumerate a few cla.s.ses only of the vast hosts of astral inhabitants.

He will be impressed by the protean forms of the ceaseless tide of elemental essence, ever swirling around him, menacing often, yet always retiring before a determined effort of the will; he will marvel at the enormous army of ent.i.ties temporarily called out of this ocean into separate existence by the thoughts and wishes of man, whether good or evil. He will watch the manifold tribes of the nature-spirits at their work or at their play; he will sometimes be able to study with ever-increasing delight the magnificent evolution of some of the lower orders of the glorious kingdom of the devas, which corresponds approximately to the angelic host of Christian terminology.

But perhaps of even keener interest to him than any of these will be the human denizens of the astral world, and he will find them divisible into two great cla.s.ses--those whom we call the living, and those others, most of them infinitely more alive, whom we so foolishly misname the dead. Among the former he will find here and there one wide awake and fully conscious, perhaps sent to bring him some message, or examining him keenly to see what progress he is making; while the majority of his neighbours, when away from their physical bodies during sleep, will drift idly by, so wrapped up in their own cogitations as to be practically unconscious of what is going on around them.

Among the great host of the recently dead he will find all degrees of consciousness and intelligence, and all shades of character--for death, which seems to our limited vision so absolute a change, in reality alters nothing of the man himself. On the day after his death he is precisely the same man as he was the day before it, with the same disposition, the same qualities, the same virtues and vices, save only that he has cast aside his physical body; but the loss of that no more makes him in any way a different man than would the removal of an overcoat. So among the dead our student will find men intelligent and stupid, kind-hearted and morose, serious and frivolous, spiritually-minded and sensually-minded, just as among the living.

Since he can not only see the dead, but speak with them, he can often be of very great use to them, and give them information and guidance which is of the utmost value to them. Many of them are in a condition of great surprise and perplexity, and sometimes even of acute distress, because they find the facts of the next world so unlike the childish legends which are all that popular religion in the West has to offer with reference to this transcendently important subject; and therefore a man who understands this new world and can explain matters is distinctly a friend in need.

In many other ways a man who fully possesses this faculty may be of use to the living as well as to the dead; but of this side of the subject I have already written in my little book on _Invisible Helpers_. In addition to astral ent.i.ties he will see astral corpses--shades and sh.e.l.ls in all stages of decay; but these need only be just mentioned here, as the reader desiring a further account of them will find it in our third and fifth manuals.

Another wonderful result which the full enjoyment of astral clairvoyance brings to a man is that he has no longer any break in consciousness. When he lies down at night he leaves his physical body to the rest which it requires, while he goes about his business in the far more comfortable astral vehicle. In the morning he returns to and re-enters his physical body, but without any loss of consciousness or memory between the two states, and thus he is able to live, as it were, a double life which yet is one, and to be usefully employed during the whole of it, instead of losing one-third of his existence in blank unconsciousness.

Another strange power of which he may find himself in possession (though its full control belongs rather to the still higher devachanic faculty), is that of magnifying at will the minutest physical or astral particle to any desired size, as though by a microscope--though no microscope ever made or ever likely to be made possesses even a thousandth part of this psychic magnifying power. By its means the hypothetical molecule and atom postulated by science become visible and living realities to the occult student, and on this closer examination he finds them to be much more complex in their structure than the scientific man has yet realised them to be. It also enables him to follow with the closest attention and the most lively interest all kinds of electrical, magnetic, and other etheric action; and when some of the specialists in these branches of science are able to develop the power to see those things whereof they write so facilely, some very wonderful and beautiful revelations may be expected.

This is one of the _siddhis_ or powers described in Oriental books as accruing to the man who devotes himself to spiritual development, though the name under which it is there mentioned might not be immediately recognizable. It is referred to as "the power of making oneself large or small at will," and the reason of a description which appears so oddly to reverse the fact is that in reality the method by which this feat is performed is precisely that indicated in these ancient books. It is by the use of temporary visual machinery of inconceivable minuteness that the world of the infinitely little is so clearly seen; and in the same way (or rather in the opposite way) it is by temporarily enormously increasing the size of the machinery used that it becomes possible to increase the breadth of one's view--in the physical sense as well as, let us hope, in the moral--far beyond anything that science has ever dreamt of as possible for man. So that the alteration in size is really in the vehicle of the student's consciousness, and not in anything outside of himself; and the old Oriental book has, after all, put the case more accurately than we.

Psychometry and second-sight _in excelsis_ would also be among the faculties which our friend would find at his command; but those will be more fitly dealt with under a later heading, since in almost all their manifestations they involve clairvoyance either in s.p.a.ce or in time.

I have now indicated, though only in the roughest outlines, what a trained student, possessed of full astral vision, would see in the immensely wider world to which that vision introduced him; but I have said nothing of the stupendous change in his mental att.i.tude which comes from the experiential certainty as to the existence of the soul, its survival after death, the action of the law of karma, and other points of equally paramount importance. The difference between even the profoundest intellectual conviction and the precise knowledge gained by direct personal experience must be felt in order to be appreciated.

CHAPTER III.

SIMPLE CLAIRVOYANCE: PARTIAL.

The experiences of the untrained clairvoyant--and be it remembered that that cla.s.s includes all European clairvoyants except a very few--will, however, usually fall very far short of what I have attempted to indicate; they will fall short in many different ways--in degree, in variety, or in permanence, and above all in precision.

Sometimes, for example, a man's clairvoyance will be permanent, but very partial, extending only perhaps to one or two cla.s.ses of the phenomena observable; he will find himself endowed with some isolated fragment of higher vision, without apparently possessing other powers of sight which ought normally to accompany that fragment, or even to precede it. For example, one of my dearest friends has all his life had the power to see the atomic ether and atomic astral matter, and to recognize their structure, alike in darkness or in light, as inter-penetrating everything else; yet he has only rarely seen ent.i.ties whose bodies are composed of the much more obvious lower ethers or denser astral matter, and at any rate is certainly not permanently able to see them. He simply finds himself in possession of this special faculty, without any apparent reason to account for it, or any recognizable relation to anything else: and beyond proving to him the existence of these atomic planes and demonstrating their arrangement, it is difficult to see of what particular use it is to him at present. Still, there the thing is, and it is an earnest of greater things to come--of further powers still awaiting development.

There are many similar cases--similar, I mean, not in the possession of that particular form of sight (which is unique in my experience), but in showing the development of some one small part of the full and clear vision of the astral and etheric planes. In nine cases out of ten, however, such partial clairvoyance will at the same time lack precision also--that is to say, there will be a good deal of vague impression and inference about it, instead of the clear-cut definition and certainty of the trained man. Examples of this type are constantly to be found, especially among those who advertise themselves as "test and business clairvoyants."

Then, again, there are those who are only temporarily clairvoyant under certain special conditions. Among these there are various subdivisions, some being able to reproduce the state of clairvoyance at will by again setting up the same conditions, while with others it comes sporadically, without any observable reference to their surroundings, and with yet others the power shows itself only once or twice in the whole course of their lives.

To the first of these subdivisions belong those who are clairvoyant only when in the mesmeric trance--who when not so entranced are incapable of seeing or hearing anything abnormal. These may sometimes reach great heights of knowledge and be exceedingly precise in their indications, but when that is so they are usually undergoing a course of regular training, though for some reason unable as yet to set themselves free from the leaden weight of earthly life without a.s.sistance.

In the same cla.s.s we may put those--chiefly Orientals--who gain some temporary sight only under the influence of certain drugs, or by means of the performance of certain ceremonies. The ceremonialist sometimes hypnotizes himself by his repet.i.tions, and in that condition becomes to some extent clairvoyant; more often he simply reduces himself to a pa.s.sive condition in which some other ent.i.ty can obsess him and speak through him. Sometimes, again, his ceremonies are not intended to affect himself at all, but to invoke some astral ent.i.ty who will give him the required information; but of course that is a case of magic, and not of clairvoyance. Both the drugs and the ceremonies are methods emphatically to be avoided by any one who wishes to approach clairvoyance from the higher side, and use it for his own progress and for the helping of others. The Central African medicine-man or witch-doctor and some of the Tartar Shamans are good examples of the type.

Those to whom a certain amount of clairvoyant power has come occasionally only, and without any reference to their own wish, have often been hysterical or highly nervous persons, with whom the faculty was to a large extent one of the symptoms of a disease. Its appearance showed that the physical vehicle was weakened to such a degree that it no longer presented any obstacle in the way of a certain modic.u.m of etheric or astral vision. An extreme example of this cla.s.s is the man who drinks himself into delirium tremens, and in the condition of absolute physical ruin and impure psychic excitation brought about by the ravages of that fell disease, is able to see for the time some of the loathsome elemental and other ent.i.ties which he has drawn round himself by his long course of degraded and b.e.s.t.i.a.l indulgence. There are, however, other cases where the power of sight has appeared and disappeared without apparent reference to the state of the physical health; but it seems probable that even in those, if they could have been observed closely enough, some alteration in the condition of the etheric double would have been noticed.

Those who have only one instance of clairvoyance to report in the whole of their lives are a difficult band to cla.s.sify at all exhaustively, because of the great variety of the contributory circ.u.mstances. There are many among them to whom the experience has come at some supreme moment of their lives, when it is comprehensible that there might have been a temporary exaltation of faculty which would be sufficient to account for it.

In the case of another subdivision of them the solitary case has been the seeing of an apparition, most commonly of some friend or relative at the point of death. Two possibilities are then offered for our choice, and in each of them the strong wish of the dying man is the impelling force. That force may have enabled him to materialize himself for a moment, in which case of course no clairvoyance was needed or more probably it may have acted mesmerically upon the percipient, and momentarily dulled his physical and stimulated his higher sensitiveness. In either case the vision is the product of the emergency, and is not repeated simply because the necessary conditions are not repeated.

There remains, however, an irresolvable residuum of cases in which a solitary instance occurs of the exercise of undoubted clairvoyance, while yet the occasion seems to us wholly trivial and unimportant.

About these we can only frame hypotheses; the governing conditions are evidently not on the physical plane, and a separate investigation of each case would be necessary before we could speak with any certainty as to its causes. In some such it has appeared that an astral ent.i.ty was endeavouring to make some communication, and was able to impress only some unimportant detail on its subject--all the useful or significant part of what it had to say failing to get through into the subject's consciousness.

In the investigation of the phenomena of clairvoyance all these varied types and many others will be encountered, and a certain number of cases of mere hallucination will be almost sure to appear also, and will have to be carefully weeded out from the list of examples. The student of such a subject needs an inexhaustible fund of patience and steady perseverance, but if he goes on long enough he will begin dimly to discern order behind the chaos, and will gradually get some idea of the great laws under which the whole evolution is working.

It will help him greatly in his efforts if he will adopt the order which we have just followed--that is, if he will first take the trouble to familiarize himself as thoroughly as may be with the actual facts concerning the planes with which ordinary clairvoyance deals.

If he will learn what there really is to be seen with astral and etheric sight, and what their respective limitations are, he will then have, as it were, a standard by which to measure the cases which he observes. Since all instances of partial sight must of necessity fit into some niche in this whole, if he has the outline of the entire scheme in his head he will find it comparatively easy with a little practice to cla.s.sify the instances with which he is called upon to deal.

We have said nothing as yet as to the still more wonderful possibilities of clairvoyance upon the mental plane, nor indeed is it necessary that much should be said, as it is exceedingly improbable that the investigator will ever meet with any examples of it except among pupils properly trained in some of the very highest schools of occultism. For them it opens up yet another new world, vaster far than all those beneath it--a world in which all that we can imagine of utmost glory and splendour is the commonplace of existence. Some account of its marvellous faculty, its eneffable bliss, its magnificent opportunities for learning and for work, is given in the sixth of our Theosophical manuals, and to that the student may be referred.

All that it has to give--all of it at least that he can a.s.similate--is within the reach of the trained pupil, but for the untrained clairvoyant to touch it is hardly more than a bare possibility. It has been done in mesmeric trance, but the occurrence is of exceeding rarity, for it needs almost superhuman qualifications in the way of lofty spiritual aspiration and absolute purity of thought and intention upon the part both of the subject and the operator.

To a type of clairvoyance such as this, and still more fully to that which belongs to the plane next above it, the name of spiritual sight may reasonably be applied; and since the celestial world to which it opens our eyes lies all round us here and now, it is fit that our pa.s.sing reference to it should be made under the heading of simple clairvoyance, though it may be necessary to allude to it again when dealing with clairvoyance in s.p.a.ce, to which we will now pa.s.s on.

CHAPTER IV.

CLAIRVOYANCE IN s.p.a.cE: INTENTIONAL.

We have defined this as the capacity to see events or scenes removed from the seer in s.p.a.ce and too far distant for ordinary observation.

The instances of this are so numerous and so various that we shall find it desirable to attempt a somewhat more detailed cla.s.sification of them. It does not much matter what particular arrangement we adopt, so long as it is comprehensive enough to include all our cases; perhaps a convenient one will be to group them under the broad divisions of intentional and unintentional clairvoyance in s.p.a.ce, with an intermediate cla.s.s that might be described as semi-intentional--a curious t.i.tle, but I will explain it later.

As before, I will begin by stating what is possible along this line for the fully-trained seer, and endeavouring to explain how his faculty works and under what limitations it acts. After that we shall find ourselves in a better position to try to understand the manifold examples of partial and untrained sight. Let us then in the first place discuss intentional clairvoyance.

It will be obvious from what has previously been said as to the power of astral vision that any one possessing it in its fulness will be able to see by its means practically anything in this world that he wishes to see. The most secret places are open to his gaze, and intervening obstacles have no existence for him, because of the change in his point of view; so that if we grant him the power of moving about in the astral body he can without difficulty go anywhere and see anything within the limits of the planet. Indeed this is to a large extent possible to him even without the necessity of moving the astral body at all, as we shall presently see.

Let us consider a little more closely the methods by which this super-physical sight may be used to observe events taking place at a distance. When, for example, a man here in England sees in minutest detail something which is happening at the same moment in India or America, how is it done?

A very ingenious hypothesis has been offered to account for the phenomenon. It has been suggested that every object is perpetually throwing off radiations in all directions, similar in some respects to, though infinitely finer than, rays of light, and that clairvoyance is nothing but the power to see by means of these finer radiations.

Distance would in that case be no bar to the sight, all intervening objects would be penetrable by these rays, and they would be able to cross one another to infinity in all directions without entanglement, precisely as the vibrations of ordinary light do.

Now though this is not exactly the way in which clairvoyance works, the theory is nevertheless quite true in most of its premises. Every object undoubtedly is throwing off radiations in all directions, and it is precisely in this way, though on a higher plane, that the akashic records seem to be formed. Of them it will be necessary to say something under our next heading, so we will do no more than mention them for the moment. The phenomena of psychometry are also dependent upon these radiations, as will presently be explained.

There are, however, certain practical difficulties in the way of using these etheric vibrations (for that is, of course, what they are) as the medium by means of which one may see anything taking place at a distance. Intervening objects are not entirely transparent, and as the actors in the scene which the experimenter tried to observe would probably be at least equally transparent, it is obvious that serious confusion would be quite likely to result.

The additional dimension which would come into play if astral radiations were sensed instead of etheric would obviate some of the difficulties, but would on the other hand introduce some fresh complications of its own; so that for practical purposes, in endeavouring to understand clairvoyance, we may dismiss this hypothesis of radiations from our minds, and turn to the methods of seeing at a distance which are actually at the disposal of the student. It will be found that there are five, four of them being really varieties of clairvoyance, while the fifth does not properly come under that head at all, but belongs to the domain of magic. Let us take this last one first, and get it out of our way.

1. _By the a.s.sistance of a nature-spirit._--This method does not necessarily involve the possession of any psychic faculty at all on the part of the experimenter; he need only know how to induce some denizen of the astral world to undertake the investigation for him.

This may be done either by invocation or by evocation; that is to say, the operator may either persuade his astral coadjutor by prayers and offerings to give him the help he desires, or he may compel his aid by the determined exercise of a highly-developed will.

This method has been largely practised in the East (where the ent.i.ty employed is usually a nature-spirit) and in old Atlantis, where "the lords of the dark face" used a highly-specialized and peculiarly venomous variety of artificial elemental for this purpose. Information is sometimes obtained in the same sort of way at the spiritualistic _seance_ of modern days, but in that case the messenger employed is more likely to be a recently-deceased human being functioning more or less freely on the astral plane--though even here also it is sometimes an obliging nature-spirit, who is amusing himself by posing as somebody's departed relative. In any case, as I have said, this method is not clairvoyant at all, but magical; and it is mentioned here only in order that the reader may not become confused in the endeavour to cla.s.sify cases of its use under some of the following headings.

2. _By means of an astral current._--This is a phrase frequently and rather loosely employed in some of our Theosophical literature to cover a considerable variety of phenomena, and among others that which I wish to explain. What is really done by the student who adopts this method is not so much the setting in motion of a current in astral matter, as the erection of a kind of temporary telephone through it.