Charles Webster Leadbeater

“ The power or thought and the multiplicity of thought-forms are tremendously great, and yet they are but little understood and taken into account.
In the ease of a particular idea coming into the mind, any one of half-a-dozen things may have happened. It is only speculation to offer suggestions in any particular case without actual knowledge of what took place. One is quite likely to be affected by one's own thought-forms. You may make thought-forms about a subject which will hover about you and persist proportionately to the energy you put into them ”

“ But when such clairvoyants come, in the course of their progress, to deal with the realities of life, they will be taught, as are those who have the inestimable privilege of the guidance of the Masters of Wisdom, how to distinguish between the result of devout but ignorant thought and the imperishable record which is the true memory of nature ”

“ Another point to be borne in mind is that it is not in the least necessary for the creation of such a thought-form that the scenes should ever have had any real existence. Few scenes from real history have been so strongly depicted by popular fancy in England as have some of the situations from Shakespeare's plays, from Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, and from various fairy stories, such as Cinderella or Aladdin's Lamp. A clairvoyant obtaining a glimpse of one of these collective thought-forms might very easily suppose that he had come across the real foundation of the story ”

“ Water has no necessary relation to trouble, but an ego who could not convey a clear message to his personality, and knew that it held that peculiar belief about water, might very likely impress such a dream on its brain when he wished to warn it of some impending misfortune. When a passing thought crosses the mind, it is usually caused by suggestion. ”

“ In a place like Adyar any new-comer will find a mass of thought-forms already floating about, and probably he may accept some of these ready-made rather than set to work to produce new ones for himself. One should take up thought-forms with caution. I have seen a man take up thought-forms and be converted by them when they were quite wrong, and he himself had before been perfectly accurate in his opinion. Sometimes, however, it is advantageous to try to put oneself in touch with a thought-form at the beginning of study. ”

“ In this definite centre you would find all the thought about a given subject drawn to a focus, and might then psychometrise the different thought forms, follow them to their thinkers, and acquire other information from them.
It is easy to see that when one thinks of something a little difficult, one may attract the thought of another person who has studied the same subject, and even the person himself if he be on the astral plane. In the latter case the person may be either conscious or unconscious. Plenty of people, either dead or asleep, do try to help others along their particular lines ”

“ You would help people on this physical plane simply from pure good-nature. So also after death. You feel the same sympathies without a physical body; and though your idea may be wrong or right, you give it. ”

“ It is well-known to all investigators that any great historical event upon which much is supposed to depend has been constantly thought of and vividly imaged to themselves by successive generations of people. ”

“ There are upon the astral plane vast numbers of thought-forms of a comparatively permanent nature, often the result of the accumulative work of many generations of people. Many such thought-forms refer to alleged religious history, and the seeing of them by sensitive people is responsible for a great many quite genuine accounts given by untrained seers and seeresses — such for example as Anne Catherine Emmerich. ”

“ There is such a thing as a kind of psychometrisation of a thought-form. Masses of thought on a given subject are very definite things, which have a place in space. Thoughts on the same subject and of the same character tend to aggregate. For many subjects there is a thought-centre, a definite space in the atmosphere ”

“ They are also perpetually strengthened by all the new thoughts which are ever being turned upon them. Naturally, different people imagine these scenes differently, and the eventual result is often something like a composite photograph; but the form in which such an imagination was originally cast largely influences the thought of all sensitives upon subject, and tends to make them image it as others have done. ”

“ Now these vivid images which people make are real things, and are clearly to be seen by anyone who possesses a little psychic development. They are definite forms existing in the first place upon the mental plane, and wherever there is any strong emotion connected with them they are brought down to the astral plane and materialised there in astral matter. ”