t and realize how easily you concentrate your
attention when you are witnessing an interesting play, or listening to a
beautiful rendition of some great masterpiece of musical composition, or
gazing at some miracle of art, you will see what I mean. In the cases just
mentioned, while your attention is completely occupied with the
interesting thing before you, so that you have almost completely shut out
the outer world of sound, sight and thought, you are, nevertheless,
perfectly wide awake and your consciousness is alert. The same thing is
true when you are reading a very interesting book--the world is shut out
from your consciousness, and you are oblivious to the sights and sounds
around you. At the risk of being considered flippant, I would remind you
of the common spectacle of two lovers so wrapped up in each other's
company that they forget that there is a smiling world of people around
them--time and space are forgotten to the two lovers--to them there is
only one world, with but two persons in it. Again, how often have you
fallen into what is known as a "brown study," or "day dream," in which you
have been so occupied with the thoughts and fancies floating through your
mind, that you forgot all else. Well, then, this will give you a
common-sense idea of the state that the occultists teach may be induced in
order to enter into the state of en rapport with the astral plane--the
state in which clairvoyance is possible. Whether you are seeking
clairvoyance by the method of psychometry, or by crystal gazing, or by
clairvoyant reverie--this will give you the key to the state. It is a
perfectly natural state--nothing abnormal about it, you will notice.

To some who may think that I am laying too much stress on the
undesirability of artificial methods of inducing the clairvoyant
condition, I would say that they are probably not aware of the erroneous
and often harmful teachings on the subject that are being promulgated by
ignorant or misinformed teachers--"a little learning is a dangerous
thing," in many cases. It may surprise some of my students to learn that
some of this class of teachers are instructing their pupils to practice
methods of self-hypnosis by gazing steadily at a bright object until they
fall unconscious; or by gazing "cross eyed" at the tip of the nose, or at
an object held between the two eyebrows. These are familiar methods of
certain schools of hypnotism, and result in producing a state of
artificial hyp