THE FIELD OF PSYCHIC RESEARCH

It is difficult to divest the words hypnotism and clairvoyance of certain sordid and sinister associations.  We are apt to think of them only as urban flora of the dust and dark, cultivated for profit by itinerant professors and untidy sibyls.  Larger knowledge of the night side of human nature, however, profoundly modifies this view.  The invoked image is then of some hushed and studious chamber where a little group of people sit attentive to the voice of one entranced—­listeners at the keyhole of the door to another world.  This “news from nowhere,” garnered under so-called test conditions and faithfully recorded, has grown by now to a considerable literature, accessible to all—­one with which every well-informed person is assumed to have at least a passing acquaintance.

A marked and constant characteristic of trance phenomena consists of an apparent confusion between past, present and future.  As in the game of three-card monte, it appears impossible to tell in what order the three will turn up—­was, is and will be, lose their special significance.  Clairvoyance, in its time aspect, whether spontaneous, hypnotically induced, or self-induced, is susceptible of classification as post-vision, present vision, and prevision.  Post-vision is that in which past events are not recollected merely, but seen or experienced.  It is the past become present.  Present vision is clairvoyance of things transpiring elsewhere; the present, remote in space, but not in time.  Prevision is the future in the present.  These various orders of clear-seeing transcend the limits of the actual knowledge and experience of the seer.  This classification and these definitions are important only to us, to whom past, present, and future stand sharply differentiated in thought and in experience; not to the clairvoyant, who, though bound in body to our space and time, is consciously free in a world where these discriminations vanish.  Why do they vanish?  This question can best be answered by means of a homely analogy.

For a symbol of the flow of time in waking consciousness, imagine yourself in a railway carriage which jogs along a main-travelled line at a rate predetermined by the time-table.  You approach, reach and pass such stations as are intersected by that particular railway, and you get a view of the landscape which every other traveler shares.  Having once left a station, you cannot go back to it, nor can you arrive at places further along the line before the train itself takes you there.  Compare this with the freedom to do either of these things, and any number of others, if you suddenly change from the train to an automobile.  Then, in effect, you have the freedom of a new dimension.  In the one case, you must travel along a single line at a uniform rate; in the other, you are able to strike out in any direction and regulate your speed at will.  You can go back to a place after the train has left it; you can go forward to some place ahead, before the train arrives, or you can strike out into, and traverse, new country.  In short, your freedom, temporal and spatial, will be related to that of the train-bound traveler, somewhat as is trance consciousness to everyday waking life.