Theos-Talk Archives (March 2002 Message tt00552)

Daniel is continue to not respond to the content of my
arguments, he just places more links to and other sideline arguments 
distract and confuse people, circumventing entirely the points I am 
making, posting.
No I am not interrested to be viewed as a good writer, that is not the 
content of my arguments, so I hope Daniel will argue the content, and 
not only find excuses to circumvent the content. 

In one of his books, "The Next World-And the Next", 
given to this world in 1966, Dr. Crookall has brought together the 
opinions of astral scholars on this topic. The book incidentally also 
deals at length with the fascinating questions of the
precise location of "Hades" (the next world) and of "Paradise" (the 
world after the next world). Dr. Crookall reports a number of cases 
in which the astral body was indeed naked but invariably became 
mysteriously clothed when the person felt embarrassed.
This does not suggest to him that we are dealing with drean-flike 
experiences but rather that the laws of the astral world differ from 
those of the familiar physical universe. In any event, the great 
majority of astral bodies wear clothes that look just like those worn
by their physical counterparts. Dr. Crookall favors the view of the 
anonymous author of Life Beyond the Grave, a work published in London 
in 1876 that appears to be based on unimpeachable messages from the 
Beyond. This anonymous author wrote that "there is a spiritual 
duplicate to every physical object," and Dr. Crookall is quick to 
point out that "if this is the case our clothes possess etheric 
(astral) doubles that are invisible to the physical eye. 

The same position has been advocated by Annie Besant and Leadbeater, 
who maintain that,although the astral world is richer than the 
ordinary physical world in that it contains many objects that do not 
correspond to anything in the physical world, the astral world does 
contain an accurate copy of every regular physical object. This is an 
ingenious theory, but when its implications are worked out it may 
perhaps seem slightly farfetched.

It would mean that every time somebody produces something, he also 
produces an astral copy of that thing. A carpenter who builds a set 
of bookshelves is really building two sets, the regular one he sells 
to his customer and an astral copy he sells to nobody.

And the same of course applies to everything. A dentist, for example, 
who fills a tooth is really filling the tooth he thinks he is filling 
as well as its astral duplicate, and when I am writing these lines I 
am really writing them twice at the same time. This is too much. I 
would rather believe that all astral bodies are always naked and that 
we are deluding ourselves when we observe them clothed. If it were 
not needed for reincamation one might almost be tempted to give up 
the astral body.

George Ritchie's (a known "astral traveller", more recent 
then Blavatsky and Olcott) astral body is supposed to have made the 
grand tour while his "physical" body was out of action.

However memory traces of the experiences during this trip were 
produced in the astral brain and not in George's regular brain. They 
could not have been produced in the regular brain since the regular 
body was not in the various places visited during the trip. However, 
it is the George Ritchie with the regular body who, e%rr since he 
awoke from unconsciousness on December 24, 1943, has claimed to 
remember the events that took place during the visit to the next 
world. How could the appropriate memory traces have been produced in 
George's regular brain? Do astral brains by some kind of sympathetic 
magic produce duplicate traces in regular brains upon "reentry"? If 
they do not, the astral theorist is condemned to the view that here, 
bw not in the case of any other genuine memories, the person can 
remember without appropriate memory traces in the brain. Even if 
there is an astral brain with memory traces, clearly nobody has or 
can have the slightest evidence that they produce duplicate traces in 
the regular brain at the moment of reentry. The altername that here 
and only here a person can remember without memory traces in the 
brain goes against everything we know about the physiologically 
necessary conditions for memories. The difficulty seems fatal either 
way. This objection may not faze astral(plus the other 6 Theosophical 
body's) theorists who, along with other occultists and also more 
respectable believers is survival, seriously believe in what they 
call "extra-cerebral" memory.
Bri.