Page:A Collection of Esoteric Writings.djvu/198

184 The impression could not have been transferred from the husband to the wife if the former did not see the apparition.

As to the difference of three hours between time of death and of the appearance, generally speaking, the shell may wander about for a time, unless it is a case of a death at which all the principles are immediately separated. If this was so, if the dead body had these two persons in her mind, there is every likelihood that the shell would travel to the place, and not finding the person to whom she wished to communicate sufficiently sensitive, she communicated with the more sensitive person who was present.

There cannot be any delay in the mere transmission of the image. The mind may be sometimes active in cases of insensibility. You may have read accounts of persons under chloroform where the internal man was feeling peculiar sensations though apparently insensible. The delay might be accounted for by supposing the person to whom the image is transmitted did receive the image by means of his odic aura, but his brain being at work at the time did not cognize the impression; it will be sometime before the impression is effaced, so the image may make itself felt at some future time.

The following instance differs in many ways from the previous ones. A man willed his own appearance at a distance to two ladies on a certain occasion. He went to bed and woke up unconscious of anything having taken place, but was afterwards told that on a certain night he had appeared to them and acted in accordance which details previously written down. They had seen him as if in life.

This may be accounted for in various ways. He may have dreamt though ignorant of having done so, and again the astral man may have states of consciousness of his own, of which the physical man is ignorant and which last for some time. Again, it may be possible that this will-power that he should go at a particular time had the effect of producing a particular nerve current in his brain, and it might actually