“Some of these nobler Vedantic precepts on the soul and man’s mystic powers, have recently been contributed to an English periodical by a Hindu scholar. “The Sankhya”, he writes, “inculcates that the soul (i.e., astral body) has the following powers: shrinking into a minute bulk to which everything is pervious; enlarging to a gigantic body; assuming levity (rising along a sunbeam to the solar orb); possessing an unlimited reach of organs, as touching the moon with the tip of a finger; irresistible will (for instance, sinking into the earth as easily as in water); dominion over all things, animate and inanimate; faculty of changing the course of nature; ability to accomplish every desire.”
Further, he gives their various appellations: “The powers are called: 1, Anima; 2, Mahima; 3, Laghima; 4, Garima; 5, Prapti; 6, Prakamya; 7, Vasitwa; 8, Isitwa, or divine power. The fifth, predicting future events, understanding unknown languages, curing diseases, divining unexpressed thoughts, understanding the language of the heart. The sixth is the power of converting old age into youth. The seventh is the power of mesmerizing human beings and beasts and making them obedient; it is the power of restraining passions and emotions. The eighth power is the spiritual state, and presupposes the absence of the above seven powers, as in this state the Yogi is full of God.” “No writings”, he adds, “revealed or sacred, were allowed to be so authoritative and final as the teaching of the soul. Some of the Rishas appear to have laid the greatest stress on this super sensuous source of knowledge.”
From the remotest antiquity mankind as a whole have always been convinced of the existence of a personal spiritual entity within the personal physical man. This inner entity was more or less divine, according to its proximity to the crown – Chrestos. The closer the union the more serene man’s destiny, the less dangerous the external conditions. This belief is neither bigotry nor superstition, only an ever-present, instinctive feeling of the proximity of another spiritual and invisible world, which, though it be subjective to the senses of the outward man, is perfectly objective to the inner ego.
Furthermore, they believed that there are external and internal conditions which affect the determination of our will upon our actions. They rejected fatalism, for fatalism implies a blind course of some still blinder power. But they believed in destiny, which from birth to death every man is weaving thread by thread around himself, as a spider does his cobweb; and this destiny is guided either by that presence termed by some, the guardian angel, or our more intimate astral inner man, who is but too often the evil genius of the man of flesh.
Both these lead on the outward man, but one of them must prevail; and from the very beginning of the invisible affray the stern an implacable law of compensation steps in and takes its course, following faithfully the fluctuations. When the last strand is woven, and man is seemingly enwrapped in the network of his own doing, then he finds himself completely under the empire of this self-made destiny. It then either fixes him like the inert shell against the immovable rock, or like a feather, carries him away in a whirlwind raised by his own actions.”
H. P. Blavatsky
The Mark Of God: Understanding Your "I AM Presence" 