Product Description

A study on the nature and power of thoughts this is the most well-known book of the prominent Theosophist, women's rights activist, writer and orator.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #69321 in Books
• Published on: 2006-09
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 108 pages

Customer Reviews

One of the best books I own
If you're into symbolism, intuition, and exploring the human condition -- Thought Forms just might blow your mind. I can't guarantee it for you, but with my life experience the author's depiction of how clairvoyants see our thoughts and spirits acting seems very true. Probably the best book I own on the occult, believe it or not, the statements made with images are profound. If you have any tendency towards being a mystic this book will give you a charge, the content will connect.

The Protean World of Thought Formation
There are a number of methods that we can use to clarify and describe something elusive. In my own work I combine phenomenology (which slowly and carefully works through the ways in which something shows itself) and transcendental arguments (which move from what is observed toward what may or must be presupposed to explain what is observed). Using these two methods together can produce a (hopefully) powerful strategy for bringing the more hidden or esoteric realm into the less hidden realm of common discourse and description. Even though they did not use this technical methodological language (especially since phenomenology was just being born in 1901), Besant and Leadbeater were certainly using the same dual approach. That is, in probing into the human aura and the thought forms that emerge within and through it, they carefully describe the data that clairvoyants almost universally report. Since both authors were themselves gifted in this area, they were in a position to evaluate what others had said about those phenomena that reside outside of the immediate boundaries of the human body. The transcendental strategy comes into play when they argue that the world must be set up as a series of more and more refined fields of energy that condense themselves in order to become relevant to the physical orders. Simply put, phenomenology describes what appears in clairvoyant seeing, while the transcendental argument tells us what the world must be like in order to explain just how thought forms got to be the way they are. Three traits emerge from the phenomenological description. Thought forms manifest: (1) color, (2) form, and, (3) variations in definiteness of outline. The correlation of color with mood and even quality of thought is well known in the literature. The form of the thought is correlated with its intention, while the outline is related to the thought's intensity of focus. For Besant and Leadbeater, thoughts are causal agents in the world of so-called physical matter and can act to alter the brain states that are mistakenly taken to be their source. The aura-entwined thought form is causally prior to the later brain state activity (to which it is often reduced). The social aspects of thought form activity are given their proper role and are sometimes manifest pathologically in what Wilhelm Reich called the "emotional plague." It is this plague ridden thought form that lies behind such phenomena as fascism and group psychosis. Of great value are the many color renditions of thought forms and their emotional correlaries. Each thought contains an emotion and vice versa. Musicians will be especially interested in the color plates that depict the energetic effects (pictured as manifesting themselves high above a church wherein the music was played on an organ) of the thought forms of the music of Mendelssohn, Gounod, and Wagner. Needless to say, the music of Wagner's Overture to "The Meistersingers" has the most powerful expression of the three. It broils 900 feet upwards in mountain-like crags with intense color fields of red, green, and purple. Before reading this book I would have laughed at such an idea, but now I am reasonably persuaded that Besant and Leadbeater got it right. John Algeo's introduction locates this text historically and conceptually and prepares the reader for the strange things that are to come. "Thought Forms" is more akin to the real thing than many of the fluff books that came later. This book would make an excellent text for a seminar on esoteric thought because of its combination of careful reflection and iconic representation.

An interesting on thought forms
This book shows us a new dimension of our universe. It offers a theory on thought forms that we create every time we think. We create around us (astral plane and mental plane) some forms that affect us and people around us. If we have good thoughts we create pure forms and bad forms if not. Well this book describes differents forms that a medium could see and that is my main reproach. Somebody that has not this gift or who has not developed this power to be able to see in astral or mental plane can't verify this theory. Knowing that in theosophy you should verify before believing, there is a contradiction. So it is an interesting theory and that's all for most of us!