Theos-Talk Archives (April 2005 Message tt01160)

Apl 19 2005

Dear T and Friends:

This may supply a part of the answer:

 
DELUSIONS OF CLAIRVOYANCE

SOME years ago it was proposed that psychometry should be used in detecting
crime and for the exposing of motive in all transactions between man and
man.

This, the alleged discoverer said, would alter the state of society by
compelling people to be honest and by reducing crime. 

Now for those who do not know, it may be well to say that when you
psychometrize you take any object that has been in the immediate vicinity of
any person or place of any action, or the writing of another, and by holding
it to your forehead or in the hand a picture of the event, the writer, the
surroundings, and the history of the object, comes before your mental eye
with more or less accuracy. 

Time and distance are said to make no difference, for the wrapping from a
mummy has been psychometrized by one who knew nothing about it, and the
mummy with its supposed history accurately described. Letters also have been
similarly treated without reading them, and not only their contents given
but also the unexpressed thoughts and the surroundings of the writers. 

Clairvoyants have also on innumerable occasions given correct descriptions
of events and persons they could never have seen or known. But other
innumerable times they have failed.

Without doubt if the city government, or any body of people owning property
that can be stolen, had in their employment a man or woman who could declare
beyond possibility of ever failing where any stolen article was, and who
stole it, and could in advance indicate a purpose on the part of another to
steal, to trick, to lie, or otherwise do evil, one of two things would
happen. 

Either criminals or intending offenders would abide elsewhere, or some means
of getting rid of the clear-seer would be put into effect. 

Looking at the alluring possibilities of clairvoyance so far as it is
understood, many persons have sighed for its power for several different
reasons. Some would use it for the purposes described, but many another has
thought of it merely as a new means for furthering personal ends.

Its delusions are so manifold that, although mystical and psychical subjects
have obtained in the public mind a new standing, clairvoyance will not be
other than a curiosity for some time, and when its phenomena and laws are
well understood no reliance greater than now will be placed upon it. And
even when individual clairvoyants of wonderful power are known, they will
not be accessible for such uses, because, having reached their power by
special training, the laws of their school will prohibit the exercise of the
faculty at the bidding of selfish interest, whether on the one side or the
other.

If it were not always a matter of doubt and difficulty, natural clear-seers
would have long ago demonstrated the unerring range of their vision by
discovering criminals still uncaught, by pointing out where stolen property
could be recovered, by putting a finger on a moral plague-spot which is
known to exist but cannot be located. Yet this they have not done, and
careful Theosophists are confirmed in the old teaching that the field of
clairvoyance is full of delusions. Coming evil could in the same way be
averted, since present error is the prelude and cause of future painful
results.

The prime cause for delusion is that the thought of anything makes around
the thinker an image of the thing thought about. And all images in this
thought-field are alike, since we remember an object by our thought-image of
it, and not by carrying the object in our heads. Hence the picture in our
aura of what we have seen in the hands of another is of the same sort for
untrained seers -- as our ideas on the subject of events in which we have
not participated. So a clairvoyant may, and in fact does, mistake these
thought-pictures one for the other, thus reducing the chances of certainty. 

If an anxious mother imagines her child in danger and with vivid thought
pictures the details of a railway accident, the picture the seer may see
will be of something that never happened and is only the product of emotion
or imagination.

Mistakes in identity come next. These are more easily made a the astral
plane, which is the means for clairvoyance, than yen upon the visible one,
and will arise from numerous causes. So numerous and complex is this that to
fully explain would not only be hopeless but tedious. 

For instance, the person, say at a distance, to whom the clairvoyant eye is
directed may look entirely different from reality, whether as clothing or
physiognomy. He may, in the depths of winter, appear clad in spring
clothing, and your clairvoyant report that, adding probably that it
symbolizes something next spring. But, in fact, the spring clothing was due
to his thoughts about well-worn comfortable suit of this sort throwing a
glamour of the clothing before the vision of the seer. Some cases exactly
like this I have known and verified. 

Or the lover, dwelling on the form and features of his beloved, or the
criminal upon the one he has wronged, will work a protean change and destroy
identification.

Another source of error will be found in the unwitting transfer to the
clairvoyant of your own thoughts, much altered either for better or worse.
Or even the thoughts of some one else whom you have just met or heard from.
For if you consult the seer on some line of thought, having just read the
ideas on the same subject of another who thinks very strongly and very
clearly, and whose character is overmastering, the clairvoyant will ten to
one feel the influence of the other and give you his ideas.

Reversion of image is the last I will refer to. It has been taught always in
the unpopular school of Theosophy that the astral light reverses the images,
just as science knows the image at the retina is not upright. 

Not only have the Cabalists said us, but also the Eastern schools, and those
who now have studied these doctrines along Theosophical lines have
discovered it to be a fact. So the untrained clairvoyant may see a number or
amount backwards, or an object upside down in whole or in part. The reliance
we can place on the observations of untrained people in ordinary life the
scientific schools and courts of law have long ago discovered; but seekers
after the marvellous carelessly accept the observations of those who must be
equally untrained in the field of clairvoyance. 

Of course there are many genuine cases of good clear-seeing, but the mass
are not to be relied on. The cultivation of psychic senses is more difficult
than any physical gymnastics, and the number of really trained clairvoyants
in the Western world may be described by a nought written to the left.

M. MORE
Path, July, 1892

Best wishes,


Dallas

===============================
 
-----Original Message-----
From: thalprin
Sent: Monday, April 18, 2005 5:16 PM
To: 
Subject: It's not like I forget,



Many people hear things, for instance, here's a gal channelling her 
dead son (I think he died when he was 8) who has 'divine answers' for 
man.