high standard of moral purity and mental balance without which
clairvoyance is a curse and not a blessing to its possessor. Between those
who are entirely unimpressionable and those who are in full possession of
clairvoyant power, there are many intermediate stages. Students often ask
how this clairvoyant faculty will first be manifested in themselves--how
they may know when they have reached the stage at which its first faint
foreshadowings are beginning to be visible. Cases differ so widely that it
is impossible to give to this question any answer that will be universally
applicable.

"Some people begin by a plunge, as it were, and under some unusual
stimulus become able just for once to see some striking vision; and very
often in such a case, because the experience does not repeat itself, the
seer comes in time to believe that on that occasion he must have been the
victim of hallucination. Others begin by becoming intermittently conscious
of the brilliant colors and vibrations of the human aura; yet others find
themselves with increasing frequency seeing and hearing something to which
those around them are blind and deaf; others, again, see faces,
landscapes, or colored clouds floating before their eyes in the dark
before they sink to rest; while perhaps the commonest experience of all is
that of those who begin to recollect with greater and greater clearness
what they have seen and heard on other planes during sleep."

The authority in question gives the following excellent advice regarding
the subject of the development of clairvoyant power and astral visioning:
"Now the fact is that there are many methods by which it may be developed,
but only one which can be at all safely recommended for general use--that
of which we shall speak last of all. Among the less advanced nations of
the world the clairvoyant state has been produced in various objectionable
ways; among some of the non-Aryan tribes of India, by the use of
intoxicating drugs or the inhaling of stupefying fumes; among the
dervishes, by whirling in a mad dance of religious fervor until vertigo
and insensibility supervene; among the followers of the abominable
practices of the Voodoo cult, by frightful sacrifices and loathsome rites
of black magic. Methods such as these are happily not in vogue in our own
race, yet even among us large numbers of dabblers in this ancient art
adopt some plan of self-hypnotization, such as gazing at a bright spot, or
the repeti