ciousness. When he lies down at night he leaves his physical body
to the rest which it requires, while he goes about his business in
the far more comfortable astral vehicle. In the morning he returns to
and re-enters his physical body, but without any loss of consciousness
or memory between the two states, and thus he is able to live, as it
were, a double life which yet is one, and to be usefully employed
during the whole of it, instead of losing one-third of his existence
in blank unconsciousness.

Another strange power of which he may find himself in possession
(though its full control belongs rather to the still higher devachanic
faculty), is that of magnifying at will the minutest physical or
astral particle to any desired size, as though by a microscope--though
no microscope ever made or ever likely to be made possesses even a
thousandth part of this psychic magnifying power. By its means the
hypothetical molecule and atom postulated by science become visible
and living realities to the occult student, and on this closer
examination he finds them to be much more complex in their structure
than the scientific man has yet realised them to be. It also enables
him to follow with the closest attention and the most lively interest
all kinds of electrical, magnetic, and other etheric action; and when
some of the specialists in these branches of science are able to
develop the power to see those things whereof they write so facilely,
some very wonderful and beautiful revelations may be expected.

This is one of the _siddhis_ or powers described in Oriental books as
accruing to the man who devotes himself to spiritual development,
though the name under which it is there mentioned might not be
immediately recognizable. It is referred to as "the power of making
oneself large or small at will," and the reason of a description which
appears so oddly to reverse the fact is that in reality the method by
which this feat is performed is precisely that indicated in these
ancient books. It is by the use of temporary visual machinery of
inconceivable minuteness that the world of the infinitely little is so
clearly seen; and in the same way (or rather in the opposite way) it
is by temporarily enormously increasing the size of the machinery used
that it becomes possible to increase the breadth of one's view--in the
physical sense as well as, let us hope, in the moral--far beyond
anything that science has ever dreamt of as possible for