What do you see in the astral plane?

This is a strange case and shows the mind’s power.

This woman’s mental affliction in life took the form of a belief that she was unable to walk. There was nothing organically wrong, yet as this hallucination grew on her, she became crippled and misshapen, even as she is now. Had the disease been a physical one, she would have left it behind her at death, but it was purely a mental one due to a morbid nature, which seemed to take a perverted joy in gazing at the misshapen and crippled. She did this, not from any motive of sorrow―or wish to help the sufferers, but out of a morbid curiosity.

How do you treat her? Mainly by magnetism and mental suggestion.

We are striving to prove to her that her spiritual body does not need to reproduce the defects of the physical one. Most spirits readily grasp that fact, but her mind has become so overclouded that she cannot grasp it. I inquired whether there was an operating theatre as in an earthly hospital. We have got long past those clumsy methods here. The spirit body yields to subtler methods and the only place you find anything approaching an operating theatre is in Hell.

What is the age limit at which children can enter Hell? You cannot fix any exact age limit.

Things work more reasonably than that, and if an infant dies who knows nothing of God, it goes to the infant schools in Hell. If it has acquired a vague idea of God and a future life, it will come to our secondary schools in the Realm of Half-belief. If it has acquired sufficient knowledge, it may go to the college. Children who have a real living belief may go directly to the realm above―or to the highest plane.

When a child reaches a certain stage in its development (roughly from five to seven), it begins to have some general idea as to right and wrong. If a child has been badly brought up―or if it inherits a perverse and evil nature from its ancestors―or if obsessed, it may develop very unpleasant characteristics and commit serious offences.

Under these circumstances, it is cut off at the wish of its guide and transferred to the astral plane. Clear of many of the surroundings, which might have dragged it down, it will have an opportunity of developing and learning sufficiently to enable it to come to the realm of Half-belief.

An adult hardened in sin continues in its new life in the astral, but a youth who has started on the downward path is more likely to be checked by the shock of death.

Even a vicious youth will probably see the folly of his ways, and the vicious habits will be easier to eradicate, as they are not yet firmly rooted. If he rejects this second chance and falls into obsessing, he will be hurled out of his astral body into hell. When that day comes, he will no longer be a child.

You see how it comes about that there are no children in hell. But there are vicious children of five or six. Not many. They may be spoilt, thoughtless and selfish, but there are few who are really vicious.

They will also realise their faults, and if not sufficiently spiritual to pass straight on to us, they will remain on the astral plane and learn wisdom. If they do not learn wisdom, they will learn folly. Even folly will take time to work out its full course, and they will drop to hell only when they have become too gross and wicked for the astral plane. They will have ceased to be children when that happens.

It is seldom that a young child does grow worse on the astral plane. Nearly all improve, and many are too spiritual to remain there, but come either to the elementary schools in the top division of hell―or else to us.

As to direct treatment, we employ suggestion, hypnotism and magnetism. What do animals such as fowl, which spend their whole life on earth hunting for food do on this plane? They can have no occupation!

While they are on the astral plane, most animals still try to grub for food, and it is only by degrees that they learn that they do not need it. The animal passes on to this plane once that stage is reached.

Many animals seem unable to learn this lesson, and remain on the astral plane, hunting astral deer, which they never catch.

Are there men who go on hunting animals, which they never catch?

Eventually, they weary of the empty sham, for they never catch anything. Usually the tables are reversed and the hunter on earth becomes the hunted there (the astral). Man is back in the primitive world without weapons and is liable to the life of fear, which our early ancestors suffered. The man who runs afoul of the astral animals is the man who hunted them on earth.

I know occasionally Molly misses a bone, just as I do my pipe.

Animals become more closely attached to us here than they ever do on earth. They understand us better, and this compensates for the loss of more material amusements.

Animals can visualise, but the average animal can only visualise a muddled sort of idea.

Their ideas are very simple, and this creates a bond of sympathy, which is largely absent on earth.

You can easily understand that the more closely an animal is associated with man, the more it will develop.

The more it develops, the more complex its ideas will be, which it remembers or understands. If we wish to communicate an idea to an animal, we have to think of some very simple idea.

By telepathy, animals are often able to read our thoughts to a limited extent.

What do you consider is the exact difference between a man on the astral plane and one on the spiritual? We are still material on the astral plane. We have an etherealised material body.

The astral plane consists of particles of very fine matter, much more etherealised than the gross atoms of earth and stands somewhat in the same relations to the ordinary physical world that gases do to solids on earth.

This ethereal body is more completely dominated by the spirit for good or evil. It is the same thing with the astral landscape.

In the spirit plane, matter has been left behind, and it is with our forms that we clothe our souls.

The landscape and the buildings, which you see now before you are the forms of those things when on earth. It is when we wish to become visible that we usually have to clothe ourselves with a temporary astral form―we have to materialise a temporary physical body to make ourselves visible to ordinary people.

In dreams, do we come to the astral―or to the spiritual plane―or sometimes to one and sometimes to the other?

Dreams are of many orders. Some are purely the invention of the human brain. They may be little more than the thoughts of the day worked over and redigested by the brain at night―or they may be pure fiction similar to the stories children tell themselves for amusement.

The very materialistic have dreams of these two orders. 

Most have some of these, but many enter the astral plane in what they think are dreams. 

Very few enter the spirit plane.

Experiences on the spirit plane seem to remain attached to the spirit and are more vivid than those of the astral plane, which being more akin to earth life become distorted as the astral reunites with the physical. It is as if the physical brain attempted to explain astral phenomena by physical laws and failed, but recognised the hopelessness of trying to do so with the spiritual.

Far more people get on to the astral planes in their sleep.

They come wandering along its fringe often half dazed and as if their connection with their bodies had rendered them only partly conscious of the astral world in which they moved. The astral body is often unable to leave the physical body owing to the gross and material life that such people live, and even when it can get out of the physical, it cannot―or dare not go any distance from it.

This is a land of change―a halfway house between the physical and the spiritual plane. It seems unreal and changing to denizens of either plane.

The elements, which form it are ever-changing and often assume forms in consonance with the wills of those who pass through them, even when they are sleepers dreaming.

Eternal form goes to the spirit plane―form here is not stable except where it is the living astral form. Elemental forms have no stable form of their own. Here come a few of the visitors from earth to us.

I noticed that large bands of spirits were floating towards us. Sometimes a real denizen of the astral plane would float across this stream of dreamers. 

One noticeable difference between them was that those still living on earth trailed away behind them a thread of light. 

These threads seemed able to pass through any other cord without severing it. With their arms stretched out in front of them, many had their eyes shut and looked like people walking in their sleep. Some had their eyes wide open and seemed to be hunting for someone. A few seemed to be idly wandering through a strange landscape, stopping sometimes to gaze at it.

Now look at the dreams these people are dreaming, and the friends they are seeking.

I noticed a woman. A thought visualisation of a little child seemed to float away from her. She kept following, crying bitterly. Suddenly, the real astral form of the child came running up, and the thought child was shattered instantly. The mother gave a glad cry, flung out her arms towards the astral child, and took it in her arms. She sat down, hugged the child, and talked to it just as she would have done on earth. The child appeared to be about six years old.

I saw a man about thirty who evidently expected to find someone. 

In a few moments, he was met by a young woman. Who are these? I asked. I can see that they are both alive on earth. The man is the girl’s twin soul. He has not yet met her on earth.

I saw a man and woman approach each other with delight, but floating near the woman was a thought form of an elderly man. I knew that this was the woman’s husband whom she had married, while the younger man with whom she was now speaking was the man she really loved.

I heard an agonised shriek, and saw a man pursued by another who had a knife in his hand. The hunted man kept looking over his shoulder. His face was livid and his whole attitude betokened abject fear.

What does this mean?

The dark man considers he has been done a great wrong by the fair man, and when they meet on the astral plane, he acts as he would like to act on earth. Will they remember this experience when they awake on earth? I think each will retain some memory, but it will be a distorted one.

Does place exist on the astral plane in the same way as it does on earth?

The astral landscape correlates with the surface of the physical world, but our astral bodies are unbounded by time and space, as they are on earth. 

We can rush from one part of the earth to another in (less than) no time. 

Nor do the astral landscapes exactly correspond to landscapes on earth, for there are many layers of astral landscape, for example, the site of London has not only held prehistoric forest, but has been covered by the ocean itself.

To most astrals still living on earth, the change back from the astral to physical conditions seems like falling asleep.

A large number of people come night after night to the astral plane. Some have a regular and continuous life here, just as they have on earth, only when they awake, they do not remember, and it is seldom that a very clear recollection of either state is carried into the other.

Some astrals do not realise they are dead.

Most keep some memory of their earth life and come here with fixed recollections of some earth friend whom they desire to find.

Some remember distorted fragments of their experiences here.

There are, also, some who seldom if ever come here until death. They are so materialistic, for example, gross feeders and heavy drinkers who chain their astral bodies to their physical, that the astral cannot escape from the physical.