Researching for The Secret Li$e of Plants in the 197os, I accumulated
some extraordinary material on nature spirits, but the book was already
too long and-said my publisher-too "far out." Better not strain
credulity.
Years passed, more material accumulated, and in the late 1980s I
found a way to include a chapter in the appendix to Secrets of the Soil.
That chapter, "Three Quarks for Muster Mark," in which I observed
that theosophists as effective clairvoyants could match and even im-
prove on the efforts of particle physicists, was to change my whole ap-
proach to the world of nature spirits and to Nature.
In that chapter I recount how, at the end of the last century,
theosophists Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater described in a book
called Occult Chemistry the physical makeup of every then-known
chemical element, including some isotopes not yet &scovered.This ex-
traordinary feat they claimed to have accomplished by means of inten-
sive yoga training in India under expert guidance, which provided them
with the faculty known in the extensive literature of Indian yoga as sid-
dhi. This psychic power allows yogis to develop an inner organ of per-
ception that enables them to attune their vision to microscopic levels.
The two theosophists' feat was carried out partly in Europe and
partly in India. Charles Leadbeater, lying prone under the ministrations
of a masseur, would psychically visualize the interior of the various
atoms, while Annie Besant, sitting cross-legged on a rug with a pad in
her lap, would sketch the inner makeup of all the then-known ele-
ments, one by one.
The impact on the world of the resulting extraordinary opus was
minimal. When Occult Chemistry was first published in 1895, scientists
rejected its amazing revelations as pure fantasy. Almost a century was
joyce
(Joyce)
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