without only in appearance, since it is nothing but the natural reaction
upon him of his own thought-forms. Each man travels through space
enclosed within a cage of his own building, surrounded by a mass of the
forms created by his habitual thoughts. Through this medium he looks out
upon the world, and naturally he sees everything tinged with its
predominant colours, and all rates of vibration which reach him from
without are more or less modified by its rate. Thus until the man learns
complete control of thought and feeling, he sees nothing as it really
is, since all his observations must be made through this medium, which
distorts and colours everything like badly-made glass.

If the thought-form be neither definitely personal nor specially aimed
at someone else, it simply floats detached in the atmosphere, all the
time radiating vibrations similar to those originally sent forth by its
creator. If it does not come into contact with any other mental body,
this radiation gradually exhausts its store of energy, and in that case
the form falls to pieces; but if it succeeds in awakening sympathetic
vibration in any mental body near at hand, an attraction is set up, and
the thought-form is usually absorbed by that mental body. Thus we see
that the influence of the thought-form is by no means so far-reaching as
that of the original vibration; but in so far as it acts, it acts with
much greater precision. What it produces in the mind-body which it
influences is not merely a thought of an order similar to that which
gave it birth; it is actually the same thought. The radiation may affect
thousands and stir up in them thoughts on the same level as the
original, and yet it may happen that no one of them will be identical
with that original; the thought-form can affect only very few, but in
those few cases it will reproduce exactly the initiatory idea.

The fact of the creation by vibrations of a distinct form, geometrical