“As Baboo Peary Chand Mittra says, in a letter to the President of the National Association of Spiritualists, Mr. Alexander Calder, “a spirit is an essence or power, and has no form. …The very idea of form implies ‘materialism’. The spirits [astral souls, we should say] … can assume forms for time, but form is not their permanent state. The more material is our soul, the more material is our conception of spirits.”
Epimenides, the Orphikos, was renowned for his “sacred and marvelous nature”, and for the faculty his soul possessed of quitting its body “as long and as often as it pleased.” The ancient philosophers who have testified to this ability may be reckoned by dozens. Apollonius left his body at a moment’s notice, but it must be remembered Apollonius was an adept – a “magician”. Had he been simply a medium, he could not have performed such feats at will. Empedocles of Agrigentum, the Pythagorean thaumaturgist, required no conditions to arrest a waterspout which had broken over the city. Neither did he need any to recall a woman to life, as he did.
Apollonius used no darkened room in which to perform his aethrobatic feats. Vanishing suddenly in the air before the eyes of Domitian and a whole crowd of witnesses (many thousands), he appeared an hour after in the grotto of Puteoli. But investigation would have shown that his physical body having become invisible by the concentration of Akasa about it, he could walk off unperceived to some secure retreat in the neighborhood, and an hour after, his astral form appears at Puteoli to his friends and seem to be the man himself.
No more did Simon Magus wait to be entranced to fly off in the air before the apostles and crowds of witnesses. “It requires no conjuration and ceremonies; circle-making and incensing are mere nonsense and juggling”, says Paracelsus. The human spirit “is so great a thing that no man can express it; as God Himself is eternal and unchangeable, so also is the mind of man. If we rightly understood its powers, nothing would be impossible to us on earth. The imagination is strengthened and developed through faith in our will. Faith must confirm the imagination, for faith establishes the will.””
H. P. Blavatsky
The Mark Of God: Understanding Your "I AM Presence" 