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Permalink Reply by Nicholas Weeks on January 8, 2011 at 12:07pm

WQ Judge on Karma & astral light - from his "Epitome of Theosophy" article:

"The world of the elementals is an important factor in our world and in the course of the student. Each thought as it is evolved by a man coalesces instantly with an elemental, and is then beyond the man's power.

It can easily be seen that this process is going on every instant. Therefore, each thought exists as an entity. Its length of life depends on two things: (a) The original force of the person's will and thought; (b) The power of the elemental which coalesced with it, the latter being determined by the class to which the elemental belongs. This is the case with good and bad thoughts alike, and as the will beneath the generality of wicked thoughts is usually powerful, we can see that the result is very important, because the elemental has no conscience and obtains its constitution and direction from the thought it may from time to time carry.

Each human being has his own elementals that partake of his nature and his thoughts. If you fix your thoughts upon a person in anger, or in critical, uncharitable judgment, you attract to yourself a number of those elementals that belong to, generate, and are generated by this particular fault or failing, and they precipitate themselves upon you. Hence, through the injustice of your merely human condemnation, which cannot know the source and causes of the action of another, you at once become a sharer of his fault or failing by your own act, and the spirit expelled returns "with seven devils worse than himself."

This is the origin of the popular saying that "curses, like chickens, come home to roost," and has its root in the laws governing magnetic affinity.

In the Kali-Yuga we are hypnotized by the effect of the immense body of images in the Astral Light, compounded of all the deeds, thoughts, and so forth of our ancestors, whose lives tended in a material direction. These images influence the inner man -- who is conscious of them -- by suggestion. In a brighter age the influence of such images would be towards Truth. The effect of the Astral Light, as thus molded and painted by us, will remain so long as we continue to place those images there, and it thus becomes our judge and our executioner. Every universal law thus contains within itself the means for its own accomplishment and the punishment for its violation, and requires no further authority to postulate it or to carry out its decrees.

The Astral Light by its inherent action both evolves and destroys forms. It is the universal register. Its chief office is that of a vehicle for the operation of the laws of Karma, or the progress of the principle of life, and it is thus in a deep spiritual sense a medium or "mediator" between man and his Deity -- his higher spirit."

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Permalink Reply by Nicholas Weeks on January 8, 2011 at 1:36pm

Within Theosophy "everywhere and a lot".  Look under the entry Elemental here, for the CW references:

http://www.katinkahesselink.net/blavatsky/articles/v15/cum_index_e.htm

Also used in Mahatma Letters, SD etc.

 

If you mean outside of Theosophy, I do not know off hand.

Joe Fulton said:

Where was the term "Elemental" used and when?

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Permalink Reply by Martin Euser on January 8, 2011 at 3:36pm

Joe Fulton said:

Where was the term "Elemental" used and when?

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Joe: I have seen this term used by Spiritualists now and then. More often they used the term "entities" and sometimes "astral forces" .

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