Psychic Powers how and in what measure this responsibility is to

be fulfilled.

(c) Your relationship with the world of the mind.

This includes a review of the powers of the intellect, of the great vistas of comprehension and of judgment to which the mental level of your psyche is native; not only within itself, but in- cluding the immense world of thought in which it participates. You can recognize that your brain, nervous system, emotional nature and other cir- cumstances place limitations which are not its own upon your mind; the mind is, in its own nature, essentially free and necessarily self-deter- mining.

At the same time, your survey of it should include a recognition that this free and, ultimately, invincible Mind is always responsible to that which is its origin and goal, the inmost pinnacle of the psyche, the Higher Self or spirit.

In a certain sense, you are the rational mind, and as such you are poised continually between your Higher Self and your emotional-instinctual nature. The way to keep this balance is to recognize the presence of the Higher Self and to seek its guidance. Even if to begin with you have no aware-

ness of it, this acceptance of the right order will lead you to develop that awareness.

Psychic Abilities and Mechanisms 77

(d) Your relationship with your Higher Self.

When the rational mind becomes receptive to promptings from the Higher Self, it becomes the interpreter and representative of the Higher Self to the lower faculties: that is, to the emotional and instinctual level of the psyche, and to the physical body. The responsibility of the rational mind is not simply to attach itself to the Higher Self, but to link the lower faculties, through itself, to that luminous reality which is in truth a facet of Godhead. The level of the Mind is the only level of the psyche which is capable of achiev- ing this link, and thus aligning the whole being to the life-giving source. The entirety of which re- uniting bond, from the height to the depth, is Love.

To return to our examination of psychic abilities. The writings of Professor Leonid L. Vasiliev, the pioneer of psychic research in Soviet Russia, are notable for their scientific precision. In an atmosphere which was at that time hostile to any evidence of the existence of mind-power, he had to take every precaution to ensure nobody could challenge his statements. In his book Mysterious Phenomena of the Human Psyche* he relates the painstaking precautions of two French ex- perimenters to establish the reality of the force exerted by a psychic moving an object by telekinesis.

*Translated by Sonia Volochova, introduction by Felix Morrow (University Books, New York 1965).

72 Psychic Powers The psychic, well-known Rudi Schneider, was being tested by the director of the Paris Institute for Meta- psychology, Eugene Osty, with the help of Marcel Osty, his son. Schneider, whose hands and feet were held by the two investigators throughout the test, was seated at some distance from the table on which was the object he was to move: a handkerchief. Table and handkerchief were guarded by infra-red beams, monitored by a galva- nometer; other apparatus, including a camera, was con- trolled by ultra-violet light.

This arrangement was made because during a pre- vious experiment which had been geared merely to exclude trickery, the genuineness of Schneider's psychic activity had been established and the handkerchief had been moved, but there was nothing to show "how it was done." The psychic himself had stated at that time that a substance, invisible to the others but visible to himself, had been exuded from his body; he could control it, and would use it to move the handkerchief. The new experiment, with its complex equipment, was accordingly set up by the Ostys to test the objective existence of the invisible substance.

Astonishingly to the people of that time (1930- 1931) the results of this test were entirely in accord with what Rudi Schneider had said. The handkerchief was moved, no visible object had approached it, but the galvanometer recording showed that some type of palpable force had broken through the infra-red beam at

Psychic Abilities and Mechanisms 73

The Ostys reported their experiments in the Revue Metapsychique (#6, 1931 and #1 & 2, 1932). Vasiliev expresses surprise that nobody took up the report, either to support or to challenge it, and nobody brought it to the attention of the world at large. We may think it was, perhaps, "nobody's pigeon;" the evidence of psychic power may have offended the materialists, while the evidence of the near-material nature of the force employed may have offended the upholders of psy- chism. At all events, this well-conducted, well-doc- umented experiment is of very great interest to us.

Certainly the force employed by Schneider was a "psychic" force: it was not a component of his physi- cal body. Without any reasonable doubt, it was the same as the "ectoplasm " of physical mediumship, and as the "astral substance" from which the out-of-the-body traveler creates his vehicle, or astral likeness.

This astral substance can be ejected from various regions of the body - the solar plexus and the crown of the head are frequent sites - or more rarely from all the body surface, as seems to have occurred here. It varies in density according to whether it is drawn from a higher or lower part of the astral level: for most psychic purposes the lowest levels are not employed, as so doing can cause unwelcome disturbances in the phy- sical body. In the case under discussion, Schneider was probably employing a denser level of astral substance than was strictly needed for his purpose.

74 Psychic Powers