Theos-Talk Archives (June 2004 Message tt00259)

A Precipitation that left PERMANENT MARKS:  
No ILLUSION OF SOLIDITY here!

In several of my recent posts, I have given extracts from
both HPB and Master KH on the precipitation process.  
In light of those citations, one can start to understand
the following account. Note well that this precipitation 
was NOT temporary giving as Leon would say an "illusion 
of solidity" but left PERMANENT MARKS which were still 
there many years later in the 1890s when Olcott wrote 
this account for OLD DIARY LEAVES.

In Old Diary Leaves (I, 40-42), Henry Olcott writes about
the following phenomenon performed in 1875:

=====================================================

An experiment [was] made by HPB, with myself
as a passive agent after my coming to her house
in Philadelphia. She was tipping tables for me,
with and without the contact between her hands
and the table, making loud and tiny raps—sometimes
while holding her hand six inches above the
wood and sometimes while resting her hand upon
mine as it lay flat upon the table—and spelling
out messages to me from the pretended John King,
which, as rapped out by the alphabet, I recorded
on scraps of paper. At last some of these messages
relating to third parties seemed worth keeping, so
one day, on my way home, I bought a reporter's
notebook, and, on getting to the house, showed it
to her and explained its intended use. She was
seated at the time and I standing. Without touching
the book or making any mystical pass or sign, she
told me to put it in my bosom. I did so, and after a moment's pause
she bade me take it out and look within. This is what I found inside
the first cover, written and drawn on the white lining paper in lead
pencil:

JOHN KING,
HENRY DE MORGAN,
his book.
4th of the Fourth month in A.D. 1875.

Underneath this, the drawing of a Rosicrucian jewel; over the arch of
the jeweled crown, the word FATE; beneath which is her name, "Helen,"
followed by what looks like 99, something smudged out, and then a
simple + [etc.]. I have the book on my table as I write, and my
description is taken from the drawing itself. One striking feature of
this example of psycho-dynamics is the fact that no one but myself
had touched the book after it was purchased; I had had it in my
pocket until it was shown to HPB, from the distance of two or three
feet, had myself held it in my bosom, removed it a moment later when
bidden, and the precipitation of the lead-pencil writing and drawing
had been done while the book was inside my waistcoat. Now the writing
inside the cover of the book is very peculiar. It is a quaint and
quite individual handwriting, not like HPB's, but identical with that
in all the written messages I had from first to last from "John
King." HPB having, then, the power of precipitation, must have
transferred from her mind to the paper the images of words traced in
this special style of script; or, if not she, but some other expert
in this art did it, then that other person must have done it in that
same way—i.e., have first pictured to himself mentally the images
of those words and that drawing, and then precipitated, that is, made
them visible on the paper, as though written with a lead pencil.

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Daniel Caldwell
http://hpb.cc
http://theosophy.info