The Astral Plane. Charles Webster Leadbeater

The details of the differences between these three higher subplanes will perhaps be more readily explicable when we come to deal with their human inhabitants.

      An account of the scenery of the astral plane would be incomplete without some mention of what have often, though I think mistakenly, been called the Records of the Astral Light. These records (which are in truth a sort of materialization of the Divine memory—a living photographic representation of all that has ever happened) are really and permanently impressed upon a much higher level, and are only reflected in a more or less spasmodic manner on the astral plane; so that one whose power of vision does not rise above this will be likely to obtain only occasional and disconnected pictures of the past instead of a coherent narrative. But nevertheless these reflected pictures of all kinds of past events are constantly being reproduced in the astral world, and form an important part of the surroundings of the investigator there. I have not space to do more than just mention them here, but a fuller account of them will be found in Chapter VII of my little book on Clairvoyance.

       INHABITANTS

      HAVING sketched in, however slightly, the background of our picture, we must now attempt to fill in the figures—to describe the inhabitants of the astral plane. The immense variety of these beings makes it exceedingly difficult to arrange and tabulate them. Perhaps the most convenient method will be to divide them into three great classes, the human, the non-human, and the artificial.