I take the liberty of quoting here from my little book, “The Astral World,” in order to give you some further idea of the nature of these records in the Astral Light.  The reader is supposed to be travelling in his astral body, having the phenomena of the astral pointed out to him by a competent occultist acting as his guide.  The occultist-guide says to the student:  “Changing our vibrations, we find ourselves entering a strange region, the nature of which you at first fail to discern.  Pausing a moment until your astral vision becomes attuned to the peculiar vibrations of this region, you will find that you are becoming gradually aware of what may be called an immense picture gallery, spreading out in all directions, and apparently bearing a direct relation to every point of space on the surface of the earth.  At first, you find it difficult to decipher the meaning of this great array of pictures.  The trouble arises from the fact that they are arranged not one after the other in sequence on a flat plane; but rather in sequence, one after another, in a peculiar order which may be called the order of ‘X-ness in space,’ because it is neither the dimension of length, breadth, or depth—­it is practically the order of the fourth dimension in space, which cannot be described in terms of ordinary spatial dimension.  Again, you find upon closely examining the pictures that they are very minute—­practically microscopic in size—­and require the use of the peculiar magnifying power of astral vision to bring them up to a size capable of being recognized by your faculty of visual recognition.

“The astral vision, when developed, is capable of magnifying any object, material or astral, to an enormous degree—­for instance, the trained occultist is able to perceive the whirling atoms and corpuscles of matter, by means of this peculiarity of astral vision.  Likewise, he is able to plainly perceive many fine vibrations of light which are invisible to the ordinary sight.  In fact, the peculiar Astral Light which pervades this region is due to the power of the astral vision to perceive and register these fine vibrations of light.  Bring this power of magnifying into operation, and you will see that each of the little points and details of the great world picture so spread before you in the Astral Light is really a complete scene of a certain place on earth, at a certain period in the history of the earth.  It resembles one of the small views in a series of moving pictures—­a single view of a roll-film.  It is fixed, and not in motion, and yet we can move forward along the fourth dimension, and thus obtain a moving picture of the history of any point on the surface of the earth, or even combine the various points into a large moving picture, in the same way.  Let us prove this by actual experiment.  Close your eyes for a moment, while we travel back in time (so to speak) along the series of these astral records—­for, indeed, they travel back to the beginning of the history of the earth.  Now open your eyes!  Looking around you, you perceive the pictured representation of strange scenes filled with persons wearing a peculiar garb—­but all is still, no life, no motion.