The heat from a stove will be felt in a room long after the stove has been removed from it.  A room will long contain the odor of something that has been removed from it.  It is said that in one of the old mosques of Persia there may be perceived the faint odor of the musk that was exposed there hundreds of years ago—­the very walls are saturated with the pungent odor.  Again, is it not wonderful that our memories preserve the images of the sounds and forms which were placed there perhaps fifty years and more ago?  How do these memory images survive and exist?  Though we may have thought of the past thing for half a lifetime, yet, suddenly its image flashes into our consciousness.  Surely this is as wonderful 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.