Section 4

matter that it would now be difficult to dislodge it. It was probably at first chosen by observers in consequence of the luminous appearance of astral as compared with physical matter. The student is advised to read, on this whole subject, Manual No. v., The Astral Plane, by C. W. Leadbeater.
38
one to be dowered with working astral faculties, men and women would at first be unconscious of any differ- ence in their surroundings; ''dead" people who wake up in the lower regions of the astral world often find themselves in such a state and believe themselves to be yet living in the physical world. As most of us have not yet developed astral vision, it is necessary to enforce this relative reality of the astral world as a part of the phenomenal universe, and to see it with the mental eye, if not with the astral. It is as real as — • in fact, not being quite so far removed from the One Reality, it is more real than — the physical; its phenomena are open to competent observation like those of the physical plane. Just as down here a blind man cannot see physical ob- jects, and as' many things can only be observed with the help of apparatus — the microscope, spectroscope, etc. — so is it with the astral plane. Astrally blind people can- not see astral objects at all, and many things escape or- dinary astral vision, or clairvoyance. But at the present stage of evolution many people could develop the astral senses and are developing them to some extent, thus enabling themselves to receive the subtler vibrations of the astral plane. Such persons are indeed liable to make many mistakes, as a child makes mistakes when he begins to use his physical senses, but these mistakes are corrected by wider experience, and after a time they can see and hear as accurately on the astral as on the physical plane. It is not desirable to force this develop- ment by artificial means, for until some amount of spiritual strength has been evolved the physical world
39
is about as much as can conveniently be managed, and the intrusion of astral sights, sounds, and general phe- nomena is apt to be disturbing and even alarming. But the time comes when this stage is reached and when the relative reality of the astral part of the invisible world is borne in upon the waking consciousness.
For this it is necessary not only to have an astral body, as we all of us have, but to have it fully organized and in working order, the consciousness being accustom- ed to act in it, not only to act through it on the physical body. Every" one is constantly working through the astral body, but comparatively few work in it separated from the physical. Without the general action through the astral body there would be no connection between the external world and the mind of man, no connection between impacts made on the physical senses and the perception of them b}^ the mind. The impact becomes a sensation in the astral body, and is then perceived by the mind. The astral body, in which are the centers of sensation, is often spoken of as the astral man, just as we might call the physical body the physical man; but it is of course only a vehicle — a sheath, as the Vedantin would call it — in which the man himself is function- ing, and through which he reaches, and is reached by, the grosser vehicle, the physical body.
As to the constitution of the astral body, it is made up of the seven sub-states of astral matter, and may have coarser or finer materials drawn from each of these. It is easy to picture a man in a well-formed astral body ; you can think of him as dropping the physical body and
40
standing up in a subtler, more luminous copy of it, visible in his own likeness to clairvoyant vision, though invisible to ordinary sight. I have said ''a well-formed astral body," for an undeveloped person in his astral body presents a very inchoate appearance. Its outline is undefined, its materials are dull and ill-arranged, and if withdrawn from the body it is a mere shapeless shift- ing cloud obviously unfit to act as an independent vehi- cle ; it is in truth rather a fragment of astral matter than an organized astral body — a mass of astral pro- toplasm of an amoeboid type. A well-formed astral body means that a man has reached a fairly high level of in- tellectual culture or of spiritual growth, so that the ap- pearance of the astral body is significant of the progress made by its owner ; by the definiteness of its outline, the luminosity of its materials, and the perfection of its organization, one may judge of the stage of evolution reached by the Ego using it.
As regards the question of its improvement — a ques- tion important to us all — it must be remembered that the improvement of the astral body hinges on the one side on the purification of the physical body, and on the other on the purification and development of the mind. The astral body is peculiarly susceptible to im- pression from thought, for astral matter responds more rapidly than phj^sical to every impulse from the world of mind. For instance, if we look at the astral world we find it full of continually changing shapes; we find there "thought-forms" — forms composed of elemental essence and animated by a thought — and we also notice
41
vast masses of this elemental essence, from which con- tinually shapes emerge and into which they again dis- appear ; watching carefully, we may see that currents of thought thrill this astral matter, that strong thoughts take a covering of it and persist as entities for a long time, while weak thoughts clothe themselves feebly and waver out again, so that all through the astral world changes are ever going on under thought-impulses. The astral body of man, being made of astral matter, shares this readiness to respond to the impact of thought, and thrills in answer to every thought that strikes it, whether the thoughts come from without, from the minds of other men, or come from within, from the mind of its owner. Let us study this astral body under these impacts from without and within. We see it permeating the physical body and extending around it in every direc- tion like a colored cloud. The colors vary with the nature of the man, with his lower, animal, passional nature, and the part outside the physical body is called the kamic aura, as belonging to the kama or desire- body, commonly called the astral body of man.* For
* This separation of the ''aura" from the man, as though it were something different from himself, is misleading, although very natural from the point of view of observation. The "aura" is the cloud round the body, in ordinary parlance; really, the man lives on the various planes in such garments as befit each, and all these garments or bodies interpenetrate each other; the lowest and smallest of these is called ''the body," and the mixed substances of the other garments are called the aura when they extend beyond that body. The kamic aura, then, is merely such part of the kamic body as extends beyond the physical.
42
the astral body is the vehicle of man's kamic conscious- ness, the seat of all animal passions and desires, the center of the senses, as already said, where all sensations arise. It changes its colors continually as it vibrates under thought-impacts ; if a man loses his temper, flashes of scarlet appear ; if he feels love, rose-red thrills through it. If the man's thoughts are high and noble they de- mand finer astral matter to answer to them, and we trace this action on the astral body in its loss of the grosser and denser particles from each sub-plane, and its gain of the finer and rarer kinds. The astral body of a man whose thoughts are low and animal is gross, thick, dense, and dark in color — often so dense that the outline of the physical body is almost lost in it; whereas that of an advanced man is fine, clear, luminous and bright in color, a really beautiful object. In such a case the lower passions have been dominated, and the selective action of the mind has refined the astral matter. By thinking nobly, then, we purify the astral body, even without having consciously worked towards that end. And be it remembered that this inner working exercises a potent influence on the thoughts that are attracted from without to the astral body ; a body which is made by its owner to respond habitually to evil thoughts acts as a magnet to similar thought-forms in its vicinity, whereas a pure astral body acts on such thoughts with a repulsive energy, and attracts to itself thought-forms composed of matter congruous with its own. ,
As said above, the astral body hinges on one side to the physical, and it is affected by the purity or impurity
43
of the physical body. We have seen that the solids, liquids, gases, and ethers of which the physical body is composed may be coarse or refined, gross or delicate. Their nature will in turn affect the nature of their cor- responding astral envelopes. If, unwisely careless about the physical, we build into our dense bodies solid parti- cles of an impure kind, we attract to ourselves the cor- respondingly impure kind of what we call the solid astral. As we, on the other hand, build into our dense bodies solid particles of purer type, we attract the cor- respondingly purer type of solid astral matter. As we carry on the purification of the physical body by feed- ing it on clean food and drink, by excluding from our diet the polluting kinds of aliment — the blood of ani- mals, alcohol, and other things that are foul and de- grading— we not only improve our physical vehicle of consciousness, but we also begin to purify the astral vehicle and take from the astral world more delicate and finer materials for its construction. The effect of this is not only important as regards the present earth- life, but it has a distinct bearing also — as we shall see later — on the next post-mortem state, on the stay in the astral world, and also on the kind of body we shall have in the next life upon earth.
Nor is this all: the worse kinds of food attract to the astral body entities of a mischievous kind belonging to the astral world, for we have to do not only with astral matter, but also with what are called the elemen- tals of that region. These are entities of higher and lower types existing on that plane, given birth to by the
44
thoughts of men, and there are also in the astral world depraved men imprisoned in their astral bodies, known as elementaries. The elementals are attracted towards people whose astral bodies contain matter congenial to their nature, while the elementaries naturally seek those who indulge in vices such as they themselves en- couraged while in physical bodies. Any person en- dowed with astral vision sees, as he walks along London streets, hordes of loathsome elementals crowding round our butchers' shops, and in beer-houses and gin-palaces elementaries specially gather, feasting on the foul ema- nations of the liquors, and thrusting themselves, when possible, into the very bodies of the drinkers. These beings are attracted by those who build their bodies out of these materials, and such people have these surround- ings as part of their astral life. So it goes on through each stage of the astral plane ; as we purify the physi- cal we draw to ourselves correspondingly pure stages of the astral matter.
Now of course the possibilities of the astral body largely depend on the nature of the materials we build into it ; as by the process of purification we make these bodies finer and finer, they cease to vibrate in answer to the lower impulses, and begin to answer to the higher influences of the astral world. We are thus making an instrument which, though by its very nature sensitive to influences coming to it from without, is gradually losing the power of responding to the lower vibrations,
and is taking on the power of answering to the higher
an instrument which is tuned to vibrate only to the
45
higher notes. As we can take a wire to produce a sym- pathetic vibration, choosing to that end its diameter, its length, and its tension, so we can attune our astral bodies to give out sympathetic vibrations when noble harmonies are sounded in the world around us. This is not a mere matter of speculation or of theory; it is a matter of scientific fact. As here we tune the wire or the string, so there we can tune the strings of the astral body; the law of cause and effect holds good there as well as here; we appeal to the law, we take refuge in the law, and on that we rely. All we need is knowledge, and the will to put the knowledge into practice. This know- ledge you may take and experiment on first, if you will, as a mere hypothesis, congruous with facts known to you in the lower world ; later on, as you purify the astral body, the hypothesis will change into knowledge ; it will be a matter of your own first-hand observation, so that you will be able to verify the theories you originally ac- cepted only as working hypothesis.
Our possibilities then of mastering the astral world, and of becoming of real service there, depend first of all on this process of purification. There are definite methods of Yoga by which development of the astral senses may be helped forward in a rational and healthy way, but it is not of the least use to try to teach these to any one who has not been using these simple pre- paratory means of purification. It is a common experi- ence that people are very anxious to try some new and unusual method of progress, but it is idle to instruct people in Yoga when they will not even practise these
46
preparatory stages in their ordinary life. Suppose one began to teach some very simple form of Yoga to an ordinary unprepared person ; he would take it up eager- ly and enthusiastically because it was new, because it was strange, because he hoped for very quick results, and before he had been working at it for even a year he would get tired of the regular strain of it in his daily life and disheartened by the absence of immediate effect ; unused to persistent effort, steadily maintained day after day, he would break down and give up his practice; the novelty outworn, weariness would soon assert itself. If a person cannot or will not accomplish the simple and comparatively easy dut}^ of purifying the physical and astral bodies by using a temporary self-denial to break the bonds of evil habits in eating and drinking, it is idle for him to hanker after more difficult processes which attract by reason of their novelty and would soon be dropped as an intolerable burden. All talk even of special methods is idle until these ordinary humble means have been practised for some time ; but with the purification new possibilities will begin to show them- selves. The pupil will find knowledge gradually flow into him, keener vision will awaken, vibrations will reach him from every side, arousing in him response which could not have been made by him in the days of blindness and obtuseness. Sooner or later, according to the Karma of his past, this experience becomes his, and just as a child mastering the difficulties of the alphabet has the pleasure of the book it can read, so the student will find coming to his knowledge and under his control
47
possibilities of which he had not dreamed in his careless days, new vistas of knowledge opening out before him, a wider universe unfolding on every side.
If, now, for a few moments, we study the astral body as regards its functions in the sleeping and waking states, we shall be able easily and rapidly to appreciate its functions when it becomes a vehicle of consciousness apart from the body. If we study a person when he is awake and when he is asleep we shall become aware of one very marked change as regards the astral body; when he is awake, the astral activities — the changing colors and so on — all manifest themselves in and im- mediately around the physical body; but when he is asleep a separation has occurred, and we see the physi- cal body — the dense body and the etheric double — lying by themselves on the bed, while the astral body is float- ing above them.* If the person we are studying is one of mediocre development, the astral body when separated from the physical is the somewhat shapeless mass before described ; it cannot go far away from its physical body, it is useless as a vehicle of consciousness, and the man within it is in a very vague and dreamy condition, un- accustomed to act away from his physical vehicle ; in fact, he may be said to be almost asleep, failing the me- dium through which he has been accustomed to work, and he is not able to receive definite impressions from the astral world or express himself clearly through the poorly-organized astral body. The centers of sensation