Leadbeater, Charles W.: Man Visible and Invisible: Examples of different types of men as seen by means of trained clairvoyance (London, 1902)

MORE PERMANENT CONDITIONS.

Ill

when once it has gained a firm hold upon the
personality.

Deep Depression.

The astral body shown in Plate XVIII. is in
many ways similar to the last. Here, however,
we have dull grey lines instead of the brown,
and the whole effect is indescribably gloomy and
depressing to the observer. It does not seem
that in this case any qualities are necessarily
absent; we have simply the ordinary colours of
the body as a background, but all are veiled
by these heavy weeping lines. Our picture re-
presents a person during a period of extreme
depression, and naturally there are very many
intermediate stages between this and the healthy
astral body. A man may have only a few bars of
depression, and even they may be but transient;
or in slighter and less persistent cases, the heavy
cloud may hardly have time to arrange itself in
lines at all. Yet there are only too many who
yield themselves to these feelings, and allow the
fog of despair to close round them until all the
world looks black ; not realising that in doing so
they are not only seriously delaying their own
evolution and losing manifold opportunities, but
are also causing unnecessary suffering and injury
to all those near to them. No psychic condition
is more infectious than this feeling of depression ;