| When the occult investigator wishes to study an event in the past
                       history of man, he may most readily call up the picture fromthe memory of nature, but if he
                       desires to fix the time of the incident, he will be obliged to count backwards by the motion
                       of the heavenly bodies. For that purpose he generally uses the measure provided by the sun's
                       precession: Each year the sun crosses the earth's equator about the twenty-first of March.
                       Then day and night are of even length, therefore this is called the Vernal equinox. But on
                       account of a certain wabbling motion of the earth's axis, the sun does not cross over at the
                       same place in the Zodiac, it reaches the equator a little too early, it precedes, year by year it moves
                       backwards a little. At
                       the time of the birth of Christ, for instance, the Vernal Equinox was in about seven degrees
                       of the Zodiacal sign Aries. During the two thousand years which intervene between that event
                       and the present time, the sun has moved backwards about twenty-seven degrees, so that it is now in
                       about ten degrees[pg 095]of the sign Pisces. It moves around the whole circle of the Zodiac in about
                       25,868 years. The occult investigator may therefore count back the number of signs, or whole
                       circles, which the sun has preceded between the present day and the time of the event
                       he is investigating. Thus he has by the use of the heavenly time keepers a very
                       approximately correct measure of time even though he is in the Desire World and that is
                       another reason for studying the Stellar Science. The
                       World of Thought. When we have attained the spiritual development necessary to
                       consciously enter the World of Thought and leave the Desire World, which is the realm of
                       light and color, we pass through a condition which the occult investigator calls The Great
                       Silence. |