Theos-Talk Archives (April 2005 Message tt00243)

"Another difficulty in the way of the disembodied is that he by no 
means always recognises with any certainty the astral counterpart of 
the physical body even when he sees it. He usually requires 
considerable experience before he can clearly identify objects, and 
any attempt which he makes to deal with them is liable to be very 
vague and uncertain, as is often seen in haunted houses where stone-
throwing, trampling, or vague movements of physical matter take 
place. This power of the identification of objects is thus largely a 
question of experience and knowledge, but it is little likely to be 
perfect unless he has known something of such matters before death. 

14. A 
correspondent writes to ask whether a dead man can enjoy the astral 
counterpart of a play at a theatre, and whether there will be room 
for him there if the building is already full of people. 

15. 
Certainly a theatre full of people has its astral counterpart, which 
is visible to dead people. The play, however, is not likely to afford 
them any enjoyment, since they cannot see the costumes and the 
expression of the actors at all as we see them, and the emotions of 
these actors, being only simulated and not real, make no impression 
upon the astral plane. Astral bodies can and constantly do 
interpenetrate one another fully, without in the least injuring one 
another. If you will think for a moment you will see that this must 
be so. When you sit next to any person in a railway carriage or in a 
tram-car your astral body and his must necessarily interpenetrate to 
a very large extent. There is not the slightest difficulty in such 
interpenetration, since the astral particles are enormously farther 
apart in proportion to their size even than physical particles are. 
At the same time they seriously affect one another as far as their 
rates of vibration are concerned, so that to sit in close proximity 
to a person of impure, jealous or angry thought is exceedingly 
prejudicial. A dead friend can, therefore, quite easily enter a 
theatre which is full of people-- more especially as the people are 
seated upon the ground or the platforms, while the astral entity is 
far more probably floating about in the air." 

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