“Now, let us move forward in time, at much higher rate than that in which the astral views were registered.  You now see flying before you the great movement of life on a certain point of space, in a far distant age.  From birth to death you see the life of these strange people, all in the space of a few moments.  Great battles are fought, and cities rise before your eyes, all in a great moving picture flying at a tremendous speed.  Now stop, and then let us move backward in time, still gazing at the moving pictures.  You see a strange sight, like that of ‘reversing the film’ in a moving picture.  You see everything moving backward—­cities crumbling into nothingness, men arising from their graves, and growing younger each second until they are finally born as babes—­everything moving backward in time, instead of forward.  You can thus witness any great historical event, or follow the career of any great personage from birth to death—­or backward.  You will notice, moreover, that everything is semi-transparent, and that accordingly you can see the picture of what is going on inside of buildings as well as outside of them.  Nothing escapes the Astral Light Records.  Nothing can be concealed from it.  By traveling to any point in time, on the fourth dimension, you may begin at that point, and see a moving picture of the history of any part of the earth from that time to the present—­or you may reverse the sequence by travelling backward, as we have seen.  You may also travel in the Astral, on ordinary space dimensions, and thus see what happened simultaneously all over the earth, at any special moment of past-time, if you wish.”

Now, I do not for a moment wish you to understand that the above experience is possible to every clairvoyant who is able to sense past-time events and happenings.  On the contrary, the above experience is possible only to the advanced occultist, or to the student whom he may take with him on an astral trip, in the astral body.  The clairvoyant merely catches glimpses of certain phases and fields of the great astral record region or state.  For that matter, the ordinary clairvoyant merely sees a reflection of the true Astral-Light pictures—­a reflection similar to that of a landscape reflected in a pond.  Moreover, this reflection may be (and frequently is) disturbed as if by the ripples and waves of the pond in which the landscape is reflected.  But, still, even the ordinary clairvoyant is able to secure results which are wonderful enough in all truth, and which far transcend the power of the person functioning on the physical plane alone.

Past-time clairvoyance is frequently induced by means of psychometry, in which the clairvoyant is able to have “the loose end” to unwind the ball of time.  But, still, in some cases the clairvoyant is able to get en rapport with the astral records of past-time by the ordinary methods of meditation, etc.  The main obstacle in the last mentioned case is the difficulty of coming in contact with the exact period of past-time sought for—­in psychometry, the vibrations of the “associated object” supplies the missing-link.