The word "clairvoyance" means
"clear-sighted," or the ability to see in the invisible (to physical
vision) worlds. It is a faculty latent in all and will eventually be possessed
by every human being in the course of his or her spiritual unfoldment. Having
acquired this spiritual sight, one may then investigate for himself or herself
such matters as the state of the human Spirit before birth and after death, and
life in the invisible worlds.
Although each of us inherently has this
faculty, a persistent effort is required to unfold it in a positive manner, and
this seems to be a powerful deterrent. If it could be bought, many people would
pay a high price for it. Few people, however, seem willing to live the life that
is required to awaken it. That awakening comes only by patient, persistent
effort. It cannot be purchased: there is no royal road to its acquisition.
Two Types of Clairvoyance
There are two types of clairvoyance.
Positive, voluntary clairvoyance is that in
which the individual is able, at will, to see in and investigate the inner
worlds, and is the master of himself and what he is doing. This type of
clairvoyance is developed through pure, helpful living, and the individual must
be carefully trained in its use, in order that it may be completely effective
and useful. Negative, involuntary
clairvoyance exists when the sights of the inner worlds are presented to an
individual quite independently of his will; he sees what is given him to see and
can in no way control this sight. This type of clairvoyance is dangerous, laying
the individual open to possession by discarnate entities and, if permitted to go
far enough, presenting the possibility that his or her life, in this world and
the next, will quite literally not be his or her own.
In the brain are two small organs called
the pituitary body and the pineal gland. Medical science knows but little about
them, and calls the pineal gland "the atrophied third eye," yet
neither it nor the pituitary body is atrophying. This is very perplexing to
scientists for Nature retains nothing useless. All over the body we find organs
which are either atrophying or developing.
The pituitary body and the pineal gland
belong to still another class of organs, however, which at the present time are
neither evolving nor degenerating, but are dormant. In the far past, when man
was in touch with the inner worlds, these organs were his means of ingress
thereto, and they will again serve that purpose at a later stage. They were
connected with the involuntary or sympathetic nervous system. In earlier times
(during the Moon Period and the latter part of the Lemurian and early Atlantean
Epochs) man saw the inner worlds; pictures presented themselves quite
independently of his will. The sense centers of his desire body were spinning
around counterclockwise (following negatively the motion of the Earth, which
revolves on its axis in that direction) as the sense centers of
"mediums" do to this day. In most people these sense centers are
inactive, but true development will set them spinning clockwise. That is the
difficult feature in the development of positive clairvoyance.
The development of negative clairvoyance,
or mediumship, is much easier, because it is merely a revival of the mirror-like
function possessed by man in the far past, by which the outside world was
involuntarily reflected in him. This function was afterward retained by
inbreeding. With present-day mediums this power is intermittent, which explains
why they can sometimes "see" and at other times, for no apparent
reason, fail utterly to do so.
In the desire body of the properly trained
voluntary clairvoyant, the desire currents turn clockwise, glowing with
exceeding splendor, far surpassing the brilliant luminosity of the ordinary
desire body. The centers of perception in the desire body around which these
currents swirl furnish the voluntary clairvoyant with the means of perception of
things in the Desire World, and he or she sees and investigates at will. The
person whose centers turn counter-clockwise is like a mirror, reflecting only
what passes before it. Such a person is incapable of reaching out for
information.
This is one of the fundamental differences
between a medium and a properly trained clairvoyant. It is impossible for most
people to distinguish between the two; yet there is one infallible rule that can
be followed by anyone: No genuine developed seer will ever exercise this faculty
for money or its equivalent; nor will he or she use it to gratify curiosity, but
only TO HELP HUMANITY.
The great danger to society which would
result from the indiscriminate use by an unworthy individual of the voluntary
clairvoyant's power to investigate and "see" at will can easily be
understood. He or she would be able to read the most secret thought. Therefore,
the aspirant to the true spiritual sight and insight must first of all give
proof of unselfishness. The initiate is bound by the most solemn vows never to
use this power to serve his or her individual interest in the slightest degree.
Trained clairvoyance is the kind used for
investigating occult facts, and it is the only kind that is of any use for that
purpose. Therefore the aspirant must feel, not a wish to gratify an idle
curiosity, but a holy and unselfish desire to help humanity. Until such a desire
exists, no progress can be made in the attainment of positive clairvoyance.
Pituitary Body and Pineal Gland
To regain contact with the inner worlds, it
is necessary to establish the connection of the pineal gland and the pituitary
body with the cerebrospinal nervous system, and to reawaken the pituitary body
and the pineal gland. When that is accomplished, man will again possess the
faculty of perception in the higher worlds, but on a grander scale than it was
in the distant past, because it will be in connection with the voluntary nervous
system and therefore under the control of his will. Through this inner
perceptive faculty all avenues of knowledge will be opened to him and he or she
will have at his or her service a means of acquiring information compared with
which all other methods of investigation are but child's play.
Unused Sex Force
The awakening of these organs is
accomplished by esoteric training, as follows: In the majority of people, the
greater part of the sex force which may legitimately be used through the
creative organs is expended for sense- gratification. When the aspirant to the
higher life begins to curb these excesses and to devote his or her attention to
spiritual thoughts and efforts, the unused sex force commences to ascend. It
surges upward in stronger and stronger volume, traversing the heart and larynx,
or the spinal cord and the larynx, or both, and then passing directly between
the pituitary body and the pineal gland toward the point at the root of the nose
where the Spirit has its seat.
This current, however, no matter how great,
must be cultivated to some extent before the real esoteric training can begin.
It is not only a necessary accompaniment, but also a prerequisite, to
self-conscious work in the inner worlds. Thus, a moral life devoted to spiritual
thought must be lived by the aspirant for a certain length of time before it is
possible to commence the work that will give him first-hand knowledge of the
super-physical realms and enable him or her to become, in the truest sense, a
helper of humanity.
When the candidate has lived such a life
for a time sufficient to establish the current of spiritual force, and is found
worthy and qualified to receive esoteric instruction, he is taught certain
exercises to set the pituitary body in vibration. This vibration causes the
pituitary body to impinge upon and slightly deflect the nearest line of force
which, in turn, impinges upon the next line to it, and so the process continues
until the force of the vibration has been spent.
When these lines of force have been
deflected sufficiently to reach the pineal gland, the object has been
accomplished: the gap between the two organs has been bridged. This is the
bridge between the World of Sense and the World of Desire. From the time it is
built, man becomes clairvoyant and able to direct his or her gaze where he or
she will. Solid objects are seen both inside and out. Space and solidity, as
hindrances to observation, have ceased to exist.
He is not yet a trained clairvoyant, but he
is a clairvoyant at will, a voluntary clairvoyant. His is a very different
faculty from that possessed by the medium.
The person in whom this bridge is once
built is always in sure touch with the inner worlds, the connection being made
and broken at his will. By degrees, the observer learns to control the vibration
of the pituitary body in a manner enabling him or her to get in touch with any
of the regions of the inner worlds which he or she desires to visit. The faculty
is completely under the control of his or her will. It is not necessary for him
or her to go into a trance or do anything abnormal to raise his consciousness to
the Desire World. He or she simply wills to see, and he or she sees.
Seeing in the Desire World
Having attained this faculty, however, the
neophyte must now learn to understand what he or she sees in the Desire World.
Many people seem to think that once a person is clairvoyant, all truth is at
once open to him or her, and that when he or she can "see," he or she
at once "knows all about" the higher worlds. This is a great mistake.
We know that those of us who have been able to see things about us in the
Physical World all our lives are far from having a universal knowledge of them.
It requires much study and application to know about even that infinitesimal
part of physical things which we handle in our daily lives.
In the Physical World, objects at least are
dense, solid, and do not change in the twinkling of an eye. In the Desire World
they change in the most erratic manner. This is a source of endless confusion to
the negative, involuntary clairvoyant, and even to the neophyte who enters under
the guidance of a teacher. The teaching the neophyte receives, however, soon
brings him or her to a point where he or she can perceive the Life that causes
the change in Form, and knows it for what it is, despite all possible and
puzzling changes.
Thus clairvoyants must first be trained
before their observations are of any real value, and the more proficient they
become, the more modest they are about telling of what they see; the more do
they defer to the versions of others, knowing how much there is to learn and
realizing how little the single investigator can grasp of all the detail
incident to his or her investigations.
This also accounts for the varied versions
of the higher worlds, which are, for superficial people, an argument against the
existence of these worlds. They contend that if these worlds exist,
investigators must necessarily bring back identical descriptions. But just as,
in the Physical World, if twenty people set out to describe a city, there would
be twenty different versions, so too is it true of accounts made by
investigators of the higher worlds. Each has his or her own peculiar way of
looking at things and can describe what he or she sees only from his or her
particular point of view. The account he or she gives may differ from those of
others, yet all may be equally truthful from each individual observer's
viewpoint.
There is also another and most important
distinction to be made. The power which enables one to perceive the objects in a
world is not identical with the power of entering that world and functioning
there. The voluntary clairvoyant, though he or she may have received some
training and is able to distinguish the true from the false in the Desire World,
is in practically the same relation to it as is a prisoner behind a barred
window to the outside world-- he or she can see it, but cannot function therein.
Therefore, at the proper time, further exercises are given the aspirant to
furnish him or her with a vehicle in which he or she can function in the inner
worlds in a perfectly self-conscious manner.
What Makes a Psychic?
The faculty of clairvoyance indicates a
loose connection between the vital body and dense body. During the epochs of our
Earth's history in which all men were involuntarily clairvoyant, it was
looseness of this connection that made them so. Since those times, the vital
body has become much more firmly interwoven with the dense body in the majority
of people, but in all sensitives it is loose. That looseness constitutes the
difference between the psychic and the ordinary person who is unconscious of all
but the vibrations contacted by means of the five senses. All human beings have
to pass through this period of close connection of the vehicles and experience
the consequent limitation of consciousness.
Two Classes of Sensitives
There are, therefore, two classes of
sensitives: those who have not become firmly enmeshed in matter and those who
are in the vanguard of evolution. The latter are emerging from the acme of
materiality and are again divisible into two kinds: voluntary and involuntary.
When the connection between the vital body
and the dense body of a man or woman is somewhat lax, the individual will be
sensitive to spiritual vibrations, and if positive he or she will BY HIS OR HER
OWN WILL develop his or her spiritual faculties, live a spiritual life, and in
time receive the teaching necessary to become a trained clairvoyant and a master
of his or her faculty at any and all times, free to exercise it or not, as he or
she pleases.
If a person has this slight laxity between
the vital and dense bodies, and is of a negative temperament, he or she is
likely to become the prey of discarnate Spirits, as a medium.
Invisible Helper
When the connection between the vital and
dense bodies is very lax, so that it may be withdrawn, and the man or woman is
positive, he or she may become an Invisible Helper, capable of taking the two
higher ethers away from his or her dense body at will and using them as a
vehicle for sense perception and memory. He or she can then function consciously
in the Spiritual World and bring back a recollection of everything he or she has
done there, so that, for instance, when he or she leaves his or her body at
night he or she takes up the life in the Invisible Worlds in a fully conscious
manner, as we do here when we wake up in the morning after sleep and perform our
worldly duties.
When a person has this lax connection
between the vital and the dense body and is of a negative temperament, entities
which are earthbound seek to manifest here may withdraw his or her vital body by
way of the spleen and temporarily use the ether of which it is composed to
materialize spirit forms, returning the ether to the medium after the seance is
over.
Mediumship
Since the vital body is the vehicle whereby
the solar currents which give us vitality are specialized, the body of the
medium at the time of materialization sometimes shrinks to almost one-half its
usual size because it has been deprived of the vitalizing principle. His or her
flesh become flabby and the spark of life burns very low. When the seance is
over, the medium is awakened to normal consciousness and experiences a feeling
of the most terrible exhaustion.
It is extremely harmful to any individual
to permit himself to become so negative that his or her vehicles and faculties
can be taken over by a discarnate entity, which is what occurs when a medium is
"working." The entity can exert his or her control over the individual
to the point where the individual can no longer exercise choice in any manner,
but must live only as the entity wishes him or her to live. This control can
continue in the individual's life after death, when his or her desire body can
be appropriated by the entity. It is extremely difficult to break away from the
entity once this has happened.
Children are Born Clairvoyant
In addition to these various types of
clairvoyants, all children are clairvoyant, at least during the first year of
life. How long the child will keep its faculty depends upon its spirituality and
also upon its environment, because most children communicate all they see to
their elders and the faculty of clairvoyance is affected by their attitude.
Often children are ridiculed for telling of things that, their elders believe,
can only be the result of "imagination," and they soon learn to shut
out scenes which engender such ridicule, or at least to keep these things to
themselves.
Thus we see that, although both positive
and negative clairvoyance exist, it is only with positive clairvoyance that an
individual can accurately see and investigate the inner worlds and advance
himself along the evolutionary path. Negative clairvoyance cannot be counted
upon as a reliable tool of investigation, often brings about the highly
undesirable situation of personal control from an outside source, and can, at
least among peoples of the Western World, cause evolutionary regression of the
individual concerned.
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