The best authorities among the occultists instruct their pupils that the state of clairvoyant reverie may be safely and effectively induced by the practice of mental concentration alone.  They advice positively against artificial methods.  A little common sense will show that they are right in this matter.  All that is needed is that the consciousness shall be focused to a point—­become “one pointed” as the Hindu Yogis say.  The intelligent practice of concentration accomplishes this, without the necessity of any artificial methods of development, or the induction of abnormal psychic states.

If you will stop a moment 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