“”Mahandu”, uttered a voice, which seemed to come from the bowels of the earth, on which the Shaman was prostrated. “Peace be with you… what would you have me do for you?” Startling as the fact seemed, we were quite prepared for it, for we had seen other Shamans pass through similar performances. “Whoever you are”, we pronounced mentally, “go to K, and try to bring that person’s thought here. See what that other party does and tell *** what we are doing and how situated.”
“I am there”, answered the same voice. “The old lady (kokona) is sitting in the garden… she is putting on her spectacles and reading a letter.”
The contents of it, and “hasten”, was the hurried order while preparing notebook and pencil. The contents were given slowly, as if, while dictating, the invisible presence desired to afford us time to put down the words phonetically, for we recognized the Valachian language of which we know nothing beyond the ability to recognize it. In such a way a whole page was filled.
“Look west… toward the third pole of the yourta”, pronounced the Tartar in his natural voice, though it sounded hollow, and as if coming from afar. “Her thought is here.”
Then with a convulsive jerk, the upper portion of the Shaman’s body seemed raised, and his head fell heavily on the writer’s feet, which he clutched with both his hands. The position was becoming less and less attractive, but curiosity proved a good ally to courage. In the west corner was standing, life-like but flickering, unsteady and mist-like, the form of a dear old friend, a Roumanian lady of Valachia, a mystic by disposition, but a thorough disbeliever in this kind of occult phenomena. “Her thought is here, but her body is lying unconscious. We could not bring her here otherwise”, said the voice.
We addressed and supplicated the apparition to answer, but all in vain. The features moved, and the form gesticulated as if in fear and agony, but no sound broke forth from the shadowy lips; only we imagined – perchance it was a fancy – hearing as if from a long distance the Roumanian words, “non se pote” (it cannot be done).
For over two hours, the most substantial, unequivocal proofs that the Shaman’s astral soul was traveling at the bidding of our unspoken wish, were given us. Ten months later, we received a letter from our Valachian friend in response to ours, in which we had enclosed the page from the notebook, inquiring of her what she had been doing on that day, and describing the scene in full. She was sitting – she wrote – in the garden on that morning, prosaically occupied in boiling some conserves; the letter sent to her was word for word the copy of the one received by her from her brother; all at once – in consequence of the heat, she thought – she fainted, and remembered distinctly dreaming she saw the writer in a desert place which she accurately described, and sitting under a “gypsy’s tent”, as she expressed it. “Henceforth”, she added, “I can doubt no longer.”
But our experiment was proved still better. We had directed the Shaman’s inner ego to the same friend heretofore mentioned in this chapter, the Kutchi of Lha-Ssa, who travels constantly to British India and back. We know that he was apprised of our critical situation in the desert; for a few hours later came help, and we were rescued by a party of twenty-five horsemen who had been directed by their chief to find us at the place where we were, which no living man endowed with common powers could have known. The chief of this escort was a Shaberon, an “adept” whom we had never seen before, nor did we after that, for he never left his soumay (lamasery), and we could have no access to it. But he was a personal friend of the Kutchi.
The above will of course provoke naught but incredulity in the general reader. But we write for those who will believe, who, like the writer, understand and know the illimitable powers and possibilities of the human astral soul. In this case, we willingly believe, nay, we know, that the “spiritual double” of the Shaman did not act alone, for he was no adept, but simply a medium. According to a favorite expression of his, as soon as he placed the stone in his mouth, his “father appeared, dragged him out of his skin, and took him wherever he wanted”, and at his bidding.”
H. P. Blavatsky
The Mark Of God: Understanding Your "I AM Presence" 