C. W. Leadbeater - Clairvoyance in Time: Past & Future

This ebook edition first published in 2012by Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC.

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Copyright 2012 by Red Wheel/Weiser LLC. All rights reserved.

Originally published as Clairvoyance by C.W. Leadbeater. London: Theosophical Publishing Society, 1903.

eISBN: 978-1-61940-030-6

Cover design by Jim Warner

There's a lot of fuss these days over privacy. I use the word in quotations because privacy means different things to different people, and in the Information Age the possibility of complete privacy is moot the moment we begin to interact with the Internet. You typed a password into your computer to get to this electronic shimmer of a book. Earlier today you may have typed in other passwords to get to other ethereal bits and bytes. By accepting passwords into your life, you implicitly realize that I don't need to be you in order to see most everything you've thought about as you've sat in front of your computer screen. I just need your password.

People have always been curious about hidden or forbidden knowledge. In the days before user names and passwords, some of these seekers were the Theosophists, aspiring clairvoyants who dedicated their lives to gaining access to the kshic record, a cyberspace-like library of the cosmos. The record itself is a browsable manifestation of the memory of the godlike Logos, an omniscient and eternal entity and the greatest reference librarian the universe has ever known.

Meditating their way through otherworldly planes, the Theosophists arrived at the kshic record's endless stacks, a repository of images of every moment from the history of time and space. There, they could visit deceased loved ones, learn about their own past lives, or invisibly sit in on events from the past oreven more marvelouslythe future.

A Victorian clergyman in the Church of England, Charles Webster Leadbeater joined the Theosophical Society in 1883, intently turning his attentions to the group's more wide-ranging spirituality. He was soon teaching, lecturing, and publishing his findings in the realms of seership and other mystical development.

Leadbeater's Clairvoyance in Time is your password, your library card to the kshic record. Admission is free (beyond what you paid for this book and whatever you may need to spend to devote yourself to the practice of meditation), and the library is open 24/7 to any mystics dedicated enough to think their way through the front door.

Are you ready to go there yourself? We'll begin our journey as all journeys beginin the imagination. And for a trip to the ultimate palace of pictures, we'll conjure up a few of our own. Picture yourself in a library. Now picture yourself in a limitless labyrinth. Now paste those two pictures back-to-back and spin them around like a thaumatrope. As you do, you may be able to see yourself standing in the heart of the kshic record.

Of course, this is far too facile an exercise to actually take you there. Even though in the twenty-first century we think the world is finally at our fingertips, some esoteric knowledge is still only gained through more work than just knowing the password. All the same, your first step is easy enoughjust turn the page. In this Information Age, a click of a button and you're on your way.

Clint Marsh
Berkeley, CA
2011

Clint Marsh is a fellow collector of forgotten lore, the proprietor of Wonderella publications, author of The Mentalist's Handbook, and an outstanding resource for all things paranormal.Varla

Clairvoyance in timethat is to say, the power of reading the past and the futureis, like all the other varieties, possessed by different people in very varying degrees, ranging from the man who has both faculties fully at his command, down to one who only occasionally gets involuntary and very imperfect glimpses or reflections of these scenes of other days. A person of the latter type might have, let us say, a vision of some event in the past; but it would be liable to the most serious distortion, and even if it happened to be fairly accurate it would almost certainly be a mere isolated picture, and he would probably be quite unable to relate it to what had occurred before or after it, or to account for anything unusual which might appear in it. The trained man, on the other hand, could follow the drama connected with his picture backwards or forwards to any extent that might seem desirable, and trace out with equal ease the causes which had led up to it or the results which it in turn would produce.

We shall probably find it easier to grasp this somewhat difficult section of our subject if we consider it in the subdivisions which naturally suggest themselves, and deal first with the vision which looks backwards into the past, leaving for later examination that which pierces the veil of the future. In each case it will be well for us to try to understand what we can of the modus operandi, even though our success can at best be only a very modified one, owing first to the imperfect information on some parts of the subject at present possessed by our investigators, and secondly to the ever-recurring failure of physical words to express a hundredth part even of the little we do know about higher planes and faculties.

In the case then of a detailed vision of the remote past, how is it obtained, and to what plane of nature does it really belong? The answer to both these questions is contained in the reply that it is read from the kshic records; but that statement in return will require a certain amount of explanation for many readers. The word is in truth somewhat of a misnomer, for though the records are undoubtedly read from the ksha, or matter of the mental plane, yet it is not to it that they really belong. Still worse is the alternative title, records of the astral light, which has sometimes been employed, for these records lie far beyond the astral plane, and all that can be obtained on it are only broken glimpses of a kind of double reflection of them, as will presently be explained.

Like so many others of our Theosophical terms, the word ksha has been very loosely used. In some of our earlier books it was considered as synonymous with astral light, and in others it was employed to signify any kind of invisible matter, from mlaprak iti down to the physical ether. In later books its use has been restricted to the matter of the mental plane, and it is in that sense that the records may be spoken of as