My Library

As to the entities who may" communicate ” at a seance or may obsess and speak through an entranced Communi- medium, their name is simply legion; there is Entities. hardly a single class among all the varied inhabitants of the astral plane from \ \;hose ranks they may not be drawn, though after the explanations given it will be readily understood that the chances are very much against their coming fforn a high one. A manifesting "spirit” is often exactly what it professes to be, but often also it is nothing of the kind; and for the ordinary sitter there is absolutely no means of distinguishing the true from the false <;ince the extent to which a being having all the resources of the astral plane at his command can delude a person on the physical plane is so great that no reliancd can be placed even on what seems the most convincing proof.
If something manifests which announces itself as a man’s ljing-lost brother, he can have no certainty that its claim is a just one. If it tells him of some fact known only to that brother and to himself, he remains unconvinced, for he knows that it might easily have read the information from his own mind,*or from his surroundings in the astral light. Even if it goes still further and tells him something connected with his brother, of which he himself is unaware, but which he afterwards verifies, he still realises that even this may have been rea 5 from the astral record, or that what he sees before him may be only the