posted November 20, 2010 06:11 PM            

[Lecture delivered at the 84th International Convention at Adyar, 23 December, 1959.]

This is not a simple subject and there are no easy answers. I would like to state at the very beginning, having spent the whole of this incarnation in experience and study of this particular subject, that there are many things I do not know and many more I do not understand. I am only sure of one thing, and that is, I do not know.

Clairvoyance is very much misunderstood both in the East and in the West. It means literally "clear seeing," but this does not mean that one understands what one sees. We possess five physical senses but what we do not realize is how misleading those five physical senses are. We are always making mistakes about what we perceive at the physical level. You have only to go into a court of law and listen to the witnesses of a car accident, and you will find how their perception, their vision, their judgment, and all else differ, so that there are many difficulties in sorting out the evidence. If that is true at the physical level, then it is even more true at the invisible level of life, where the material is so finely graded, shifting, changing, altering, in shape, color, design, texture, qualities and a thousand other things at every moment. So there are many difficulties in obtaining reliable and steady psychic vision.

There are some basic difficulties which affect every clairvoyant, from the lowest order to the highest rank. Firstly, there is no possibility of making true pictures of what we see in other terms than those of the language of the physical plane. We are translating what we see into terms of things about which we know something physically and the images are of necessity distorted. If on the physical plane we meet an object we have never seen before and we have no conception of its purpose, we relate it to the nearest familiar object and hence we are apt to give it a false value. Psychic objects are even more unlike known physical objects. So this imaging and the using of words of the physical plane is one of the fundamental difficulties. Another difficulty which has to be understood is that every clairvoyant, again from the lowest to the highest, has to perceive and translate his perception through the coloring of his own auric field; that is, through the complexities of the personal outlook. Environment, emotional bias, the trend of our mind, color the auric field the whole time, and there is no hope of translating what we see except through that field. So the good clairvoyant needs to learn something of his psychological make-up in order that he may realize what is called in science his margin of error, and allow for it in the vision that he sees and expresses. Thirdly, there is the quality and type of clairvoyance which we possess. This does not depend upon this incarnation alone. It is something that has been projected with us when we arrived into life for a fresh piece of work. It depends on our training in the past and varies according to the type and temperament of person that we happen to be in this life.

In the main, there are two principal types of clairvoyants in the world. There are those whom we call the reactive or negative type of clairvoyants who very largely use the solar plexus and sympathetic nervous system as the mechanism of perception. They are the people who nearly always depend upon conditions which suit the personality that they are using. They demand certain things, and unless those things are supplied they are not able to see. Their work is apt to be personal, and they are often extremely sensitive to any kind of criticism or even objective analysis. Their feelings are very easily hurt and they are very much the victims of their own sensitivity. They usually cannot control their clairvoyance and this makes their life very difficult. We are not particularly concerned with that type of work in this meeting, but it is the precursor at some time or other in the history of the individual of that which can follow after. It is a stage along the road to a more positive and objective form of clairvoyance.

In Theosophy the thing that we should be seeking is the control of the personal life, the development of the inner man, so as to be able to see life as it truly is. In clairvoyance this leads to another type of work altogether. The first type very often depends upon dropping the censorship of the clear waking mind and falling back into a half-way state which is neither in the world nor out of it. This produces sometimes some slight degree of semi-trance. But the other type of worker uses another mechanism altogether, the cerebro-spinal system and the Ajna, or Pituitary and Brahmarandhra (or Crown) chakras, and, in advanced degrees of clairvoyance, a psychic centre which is in the aura of the individual above the head front which there is a straight transmission of direct vision to the brain. These people, if they have their capacity well under control and integrated into daily life, do not on the whole demand special conditions. A great deal of their work can be done anywhere, provided there is not too much noise or movement. They do this in full self-consciousness.

There is apt to be much confusion in the work of the first type of person. He is very often truly clairvoyant, but it is difficult for him to realize that actual clairvoyance mingles with intuition, telepathy, and various other aspects of psychic sensitivity, and it is not easy to differentiate between them. He sees but he does not always know what it is that he is seeing, nor how. He does not know instantaneously the difference between a person out of the body, asleep, or under all anesthetic, a dead person, a person in trance, or a thought form. Yet these are very different. An illustration will help to show this. A friend of mine went to a clairvoyant who had given her with great accuracy and detail a description of two people and asked whether she knew them. She said she did, and asked the clairvoyant whether she was sure that they were "dead" people. The clairvoyant said she was perfectly sure. They had waited a very long while to bring messages to her. These she proceeded to give. As usual, they were of no importance whatever. The thing that was important was that those descriptions were perfectly accurate, but one was an exact picture of the man who had sat on her left hand at dinner the night before and who was very much alive; and the other was an equally clear one, both as temperament and type, of the hero of her new novel which was half written. They were not "dead" people at all.

From the Theosophical aspects of the work the question arises as to how one can make practical use of clairvoyance, if it is sufficiently trained and at one's command. There are many avenues in which it can be useful. In the field of education, if we had people with trained sensitive perception (and there are other forms of perception besides actual clairvoyance), many of the more difficult problems of children might be either avoided altogether, or dealt with positively and intelligently. There are nowadays many quick reincarnations. Children come back with mature and powerful mental and emotional equipment, and those are too much for the little delicate bodies. Hence arise problems which a more sensitive approach would realize. Moreover, psychic perceptivity helps to differentiate between the child who is physically defective from lack of brain development, the potential psychotic, and the one who is primitive and only "defective" because born in a civilized community. The educative field would be a fine field in which to use this particular faculty.

Another use is in medicine and surgery. Trained clairvoyance can be and has been used to avoid unnecessary operations, to lessen the horrors of vivisection, to trace obscure medical problems, to help the medical person to determine whether the disorder be psychological or physiological, and so on. It is easy from one point of view and difficult front another to count the beat of the heart, to observe the blood-stream, the lymph glands, the structure of the spinal column, the lay-out of any given organ, to find out whether there are stones in the kidney, gall-bladder, and so on, or whether the problem is psychological rather than physiological.

There is also another of its uses, in art, where the artist is unable to express his vision because he gets confused with himself. I would like to say categorically that I have never yet found a fine psychic who was not very artistic, and I have never found a good artist who was not definitely psychic. But they get confused, because the clarity of the concept they are trying to embody in their work becomes lost in the mass of psychological associations which gather round it. If one can explain to them the difference between their actual vision and their mental and emotional memories, it helps them to analyze what belongs to their more-than-personal inspiration and what is purely the product of their personal minds. The true artist, because of his sensitivity, is usually quick to seize upon these things and he is also one of the quickest people to make use of them and to change his way of working.

True and deep perception is of remarkable value also in the ordinary understanding of life. We all know the feuds, the difficulties, the hatred, that religion, politics and many other avenues of work produce. If we had the perceptive quality so developed that we could put our consciousness into that of the other person and look at his difficulties, his ideas, and his expression of them as they really appear to himself, we should be able to discover some common ground where we can meet and produce a union instead of a clash. That is extremely necessary, especially in the religious life of the West.

In spite of all this, clairvoyance must never be confused with spiritual vision. No form of clairvoyance gives clear spiritual vision. But Spiritual vision and understanding may, if trained in that direction, lead to true and accurate clairvoyance. The trained clairvoyant as he goes on, uses Buddhi manifesting through Manas and reflected upon a steady, controlled, lower mind. But though true clairvoyance is partially spiritual, it is not purely so and must never be thought of as such. Spiritual vision is another order altogether. It cannot be conveyed in picture symbols, neither can it be conveyed in any form of words. You cannot come and tell me about it and I cannot come and tell you about it, because if you can communicate it in words it is not spiritual vision. It may be near it, but it is not the pure thing which can only be exchanged by a form of silent communion and recognition. You know and I know that we have had the same experience, we are unified, we are together in it. There is a wholeness, there is no kind of argument at any level whatsoever. Spiritual vision moreover changes a person, and he can never be the same afterwards as he was before. But even the higher forms of clairvoyance do not necessarily change the clairvoyant. He can still be as personal, as stupid, as silly and as self-important as ever. For clairvoyance unsupported by deep spiritual insight, into oneself as much as into others, belongs to the personality, and indeed tends to make that personality feel more important than ever, because it feels superior to the ordinary people around it.

Spiritual vision unifies all the time. It never divides. The simplest person can be possessed and often is possessed of it. He understands that the mud under his feet, the stars in the heavens, the relationship to the person he loves, to an animal, a flower, even to the ugliness, the dirt, the drudgery of life, are all one. They are part of the unity of the world below when seen from above. And there we have an entirely different vision from that of mere clairvoyance. It behooves the student of Theosophy to realize this and not to try to develop siddhis. They will come anyway to the one on the Path who is truly seeking the integration of the personality. They come alongside of the training of the lower mind, the reaching of the lower self into the realm of the higher Self, and as the two become united. We should never bother about the development of the psychic powers, because at some time or another they are inevitable. They come with our progress in understanding and our growing perception.