as the Akashic
Records, though its "commonness" makes it lose its wonderful appearance to
us.

Camille Flammarion, the eminent French astronomer, in a book written over
twenty-five years ago, and which is now out of print, I believe, pictured
a possible condition of affairs in which a disembodied soul would be able
to perceive events that happened in the past, by simply taking a position
in space in which he would be able to catch the light-waves that emanated
from a distant planet at that particular time in the past the happenings
of which he wanted to perceive. The little book was called "Lumen"--I
advise you to read it, if you can find it in your public libraries.

Another writer has written somewhat along the same lines. I herewith give
you a quotation from him, that you may get the idea he wishes to
express--it will help you in your conception of the Akashic Records. He
says: "When we see anything, whether it be the book we hold in our hands,
or a star millions of miles away, we do so by means of a vibration in the
ether, commonly called a ray of light, which passes from the object seen
to our eyes. Now the speed with which this vibration passes is so
great--about 186,000 miles in a second--that when we are considering any
object in our own world we may regard it as practically instantaneous.
When, however, we come to deal with interplanetary distances we have to
take the speed of light into consideration, for an appreciable period is
occupied in traversing these vast spaces. For example, it takes eight
minutes and a quarter for light to travel to us from the sun, so that when
we look at the solar orb we see it by means of a ray of light which left
it more than eight minutes ago. From this follows a very curious result.
The ray of light by which we see the sun can obviously report to us only
the state of affairs' which existed in that luminary when it started on
its journey, and would not be in the least affected by anything that
happened after it left; so that we really see the sun not as it is, but as
it was eight minutes ago. That is to say that if anything important took
place in the sun--the formation of a new sun-spot, for instance--an
astronomer who was watching the orb through his telescope at the time
would be unaware of the incident while it was happening, since the ray of
light bearing the news would not reach him until more than eight minutes
later.

"The difference is more striking when we consider t