 is very perplexing to scientists for Nature retains nothing useless. All over the body we find organs which are either atrophying or developing.
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 pre-requisite, 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 pitutitary 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. 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 Physcial 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 it 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. 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 inter- woven 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. 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 cliarvoyant 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. 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.
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. 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