“The difference is more striking when we consider the fixed stars, because in their case the distances are so enormously greater.  The pole star, for example, is so far off that light, traveling at the inconceivable speed above mentioned, takes a little more than fifty years to reach our eyes; and from that follows the strange but inevitable inference that we see the pole star not as or where it is at this moment, but as and where it was fifty years ago.  Nay, if tomorrow some cosmic catastrophe were to shatter the pole star into fragments, we should still see it peacefully shining in the sky all the rest of our lives; our children would grow up to middle-age and gather their children about them in turn before the news of that tremendous accident reached any terrestial eye.  In the same way there are other stars so far distant that light takes thousands of years to travel from them to us, and with reference to their condition our information is therefore thousands of years behind time.  Now carry the argument a step farther.  Suppose that we were able to place a man at the distance of 186,000 miles from the earth, and yet to endow him with the wonderful faculty of being able from that distance to see what was happening here as clearly as though he were still close beside us.  It is evident that a man so placed would see everything a second after the time it really happened, and so at the present moment he would be seeing what happened a second ago.  Double that distance, and he would be two seconds behind time, and so on; remove him to the distance of the sun (still allowing him to preserve the same mysterious power of sight) and he would look down and watch you doing not what you are doing now, but what you were doing eight minutes and a quarter ago.  Carry him to the pole star, and he would see passing before his eyes the events of fifty years ago; he would be watching the childish gambols of those who at the same moment were really middle-aged men.  Marvellous as this may sound, it is literally and scientifically true, and cannot be denied.”

Flammarion, in his story, called “Lumen,” makes his spirit hero pass at will along the ray of light from the earth, seeing the things of different eras of earth-time.  He even made him travel backward along that ray, thus seeing the happenings in reverse order, as in a moving picture running backward.  This story is of the greatest interest to the occultist, for while the Akashic Records are not the same as the light records, yet the analogy is so marked in many ways that the occultist sees here another exemplification of the old occult axiom that “as above, so below; as below, so above.”