f time as
regards the life they lived here in the body, they are usually unable to
tell anything about the chronological relation of events which have
happened to them in the Desire World, and it is a very common thing to
find that they do not even know how many years have elapsed since they
passed out from this plane of existence. Only students of the Stellar
Science are able to calculate the passage of time after their demise.

When the occult investigator wishes to study an event in the past history
of man, he may most readily call up the picture from _the memory of
nature_, but if he desires to fix the time of the incident, he will be
obliged to count backwards by the motion of the heavenly bodies. For that
purpose he generally uses the measure provided by the sun's precession:
Each year the sun crosses the earth's equator about the twenty-first of
March. Then day and night are of even length, therefore this is called the
Vernal equinox. But on account of a certain wabbling motion of the earth's
axis, the sun does not cross over at the same place in the Zodiac, it
reaches the equator a little too early, it _precedes_, year by year it
moves _backwards_ a little. At the time of the birth of Christ, for
instance, the Vernal Equinox was in about seven degrees of the Zodiacal
sign Aries. During the two thousand years which intervene between that
event and the present time, the sun has moved _backwards_ about
twenty-seven degrees, so that it is now in about ten degrees of the sign
Pisces. It moves around the whole circle of the Zodiac in about 25,868
years. The occult investigator may therefore count back the number of
signs, or whole circles, which the sun has _preceded_ between the present
day and the time of the event he is investigating. Thus he has by the use
of the heavenly time keepers a very approximately correct measure of time
even though he is in the Desire World and that is another reason for
studying the Stellar Science.

_The World of Thought._

When we have attained the spiritual development necessary to consciously
enter the World of Thought and leave the Desire World, which is the realm
of light and color, we pass through a condition which the occult
investigator calls The Great Silence.

As previously stated, the higher Regions of the Desire World exhibit the
marked peculiarity of blending form and sound, but when one passes through
the Great Silence, all the world seems to disappear and the spirit ha