e anything that we know, and consequently
whatever records we may find ourselves able to read must be only a
reflection of that great dominant fact, mirrored in the denser media
of the lower planes.

On the astral plane it is at once evident that this is so--that what
we are dealing with is only a reflection of a reflection, and an
exceedingly imperfect one, for such records as can be reached there
are fragmentary in the extreme, and often seriously distorted. We know
how universally water is used as a symbol of the astral light, and in
this particular case it is a remarkably apt one. From the surface of
still water we may get a clear reflection of the surrounding objects,
just as from a mirror; but at the best it is only a reflection--a
representation in two dimensions of three-dimensional objects, and
therefore differing in all its qualities, except colour, from that
which it represents; and in addition to this, it is always reversed.

But let the surface of the water be ruffled by the wind and what do we
find then? A reflection still, certainly, but so broken up and
distorted as to be quite useless or even misleading as a guide to the
shape and real appearance of the objects reflected. Here and there for
a moment we might happen to get a clear reflection of some minute part
of the scene--of a single leaf from a tree, for example; but it would
need long labour and considerable knowledge of natural laws to build
up anything like a true conception of the object reflected by putting
together even a large number of such isolated fragments of an image of
it.

Now in the astral plane we can never have anything approaching to what
we have imaged as a still surface, but on the contrary we have always
to deal with one in rapid and bewildering motion; judge, therefore,
how little we can depend upon getting a clear and definite reflection.
Thus a clairvoyant who possesses only the faculty of astral sight can
never rely upon any picture of the past that comes before him as being
accurate and perfect; here and there some part of it _may_ be so, but
he has no means of knowing which it is. If he is under the care of a
competent teacher he may, by long and careful training, be shown how
to distinguish between reliable and unreliable impressions, and to
construct from the broken reflections some kind of image of the
object reflected; but usually long before he has mastered those
difficulties he will have developed the mental sight,