London Lectures of 1907 | Page 5

cannot go very far. You can get a certain amount
of clairvoyance by these means, but you are only expanding your
physical sight, and working on centres of the astral body connected
with the physical organ of vision, the eye. The true astral sight is an
entirely different thing. That comes from a centre of its own in the

astral body. It has to be created from the mental body, as the organ of
the physical was from the astral. The centre of that sight will be in the
mental body and not in the astral, and only the organ of it in the astral
body. The method of the Kingly, the Râja Yoga, is always by
thought--concentrate, meditate, contemplate, think: by that means, in a
healthy, normal, natural way you will inevitably develop the powers of
sight on the astral, as in the course of Nature the powers of sight were
developed on the physical plane. And if you realise that your
consciousness is one, building its bodies for its fuller and more
complete expression, that you are here in order to become masters of
matter instead of its slaves, to become lords of matter, using every
organ of matter for knowledge of the world to which that matter
belongs, and not to be blinded by it, as we are for so long a time in our
climb upwards, then you will see that this natural development of astral
powers is inevitable in the course of evolution, and all that you can do
is to quicken it, following the line which Nature has traced. As Nature
slowly will evolve in every human being the power of using the astral
body as freely as you use the physical body now, so can you quicken
the coming of that day for yourselves by understanding the powers of
thought and turning them to the object you desire to obtain. There are
many ways in which this may be done, and many rules you may learn
for your guidance. Those rules may be summed up under two heads:
clear and strenuous thinking, discipline for the bodies that you are
trying to evolve; and also, I should add, for the body below them in
evolution. Those are the two great laws for the safe evolution of these
so-called psychic powers, what I call the powers of the consciousness
on the astral and mental planes. There must be a discipline for the
bodies, for you have to choose the material which will serve you best in
the work you are doing out of the innumerable combinations of matter
with which Nature presents you. You must choose the combinations
that will serve your purpose, which you can utilise in the building of
the organs of sense on plane after plane. Just as really as the man who
is a drunkard will injure his nervous system by his excesses, and by
supplying coarse and over-active compounds will injure the physical
body, so making it a less useful instrument for the man--as any excess,
not only drunkenness, but gluttony, profligacy, and so on--as these
injure the physical body as an instrument of consciousness, and to have

full and perfect consciousness here we must train, discipline, build up
our body with knowledge and with self-control, so also is that true on
the higher planes. A regimen is necessary when you are dealing with
the organisation of the subtler matter of the astral and mental worlds,
for you cannot build up your physical body out of the coarser
combinations of matter on the physical, and have finer combinations on
the astral and mental. The bodies have to match each other. They have
to correspond with each other; and as you find all sorts of combinations
related the one to the other on every plane, you must choose your
combinations on the physical if you desire to choose them also on the
astral and mental. You cannot make your physical body coarse, and
organise the astral and mental bodies for the finer purposes of the man;
and you must settle that in your minds if you wish to try to develop
these higher powers of consciousness. Not only because if you gather
together the coarser materials of the astral world, you will find yourself
hampered by them in the higher expression of consciousness, but also
because the presence of these combinations in you exposes you to a
number of dangers on the astral plane. The purer the elements of your
astral body, the safer you are in your earlier wanderings on that plane.
It is important to mention this, because in some of the schools of
thought which are trying only to develop astral powers, you will find
that they deliberately use other methods in order to make their astral
body active. Many