Clairvoyance in Time: Past & Future: Paranormal Parlor, A Weiser Books Collection

By C. W. Leadbeater, Varla A. Ventura (Editor) and Clint Marsh

Varla Ventura, Coast to Coast favorite, Weird News blogger on Huffington Post, and author of The Book of the Bizarre and Beyond Bizarre, introduces Weiser Books’ new Collection of forgotten occult classics. Paranormal Parlor is an eerie assemblage of affordable digital editions, curated with Varla’s sixth sense for tales of the weird and unusual.

Leadbeater’s Clairvoyance in Time is your password, your library card to the âkâshic 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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Red Wheel Weiser
• Release date: Dec 22, 2011
• ISBN: 9781619400306

C. W. Leadbeater

Charles Webster Leadbeater (1854–1934) was a British clairvoyant, Theosophist, and prolific spiritual teacher who played a leading role in the Theosophical Society alongside Annie Besant. Originally ordained as an Anglican priest, Leadbeater left the church to pursue occult exploration and was known for his claimed clairvoyant abilities, including visions of auras, chakras, and past lives. In works like Life After Death: And How Theosophy Unveils It, he examined the post-mortem journey of the soul through the lens of karma, astral planes, and spiritual evolution. Leadbeater contributed to the popularization of Eastern metaphysics in the West and was instrumental in introducing esoteric concepts such as kundalini and etheric bodies to broader audiences. Despite controversy—particularly around his personal life—Leadbeater helped define modern Theosophy and laid the groundwork for many New Age beliefs and practices that followed.

Book preview

Clairvoyance in Time: the Past

Clairvoyance in time—that is to say, the power of reading the past and the future—is, 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 k shic 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 k sha, 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 k sha 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 m laprak 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 k shic, for although they are not originally made on that plane any more than on the astral, yet it is there that we first come definitely into contact with them and find it possible to do reliable work with them.

This subject of the records is by no means an easy one to deal with, for it is one of that numerous class which requires for its perfect comprehension faculties of a far higher order than any which humanity has yet evolved. The real solution of its problems lies on planes far beyond any that we can possibly know at present, and any view that we take of it must necessarily be of the most imperfect character, since we cannot but look at it from below instead of from above. The idea which we form of it must therefore be only partial, yet it need not mislead us unless we allow ourselves to think of the tiny fragment which is all that we can see as though it were the perfect whole. If we are careful that such conceptions as we may form shall be accurate as far as they go, we shall have nothing to unlearn, though much to add, when in the course of our further progress we gradually acquire the higher wisdom. Be it understood then at the commencement that a thorough grasp of our subject is an impossibility at the present stage of our evolution, and that many points will arise as to which no exact explanation is yet obtainable, though it may often be possible to suggest analogies and to indicate the lines along which an explanation must lie.

Let us then try to carry back our thoughts to the beginning of this solar system to which we belong. We are all familiar with the ordinary astronomical theory of its origin—that