To continue:
History tells us that there have always been crystal-gazers, geomancers, augurs, and soothsayers of many kinds, who use some form of apparatus which excites or stimulates psychic activity. Such means are legion and include sand-divining, card-reading, teacup-reading, automatic-writing, and all the lesser esoteric arts. The apparatus used mostly serves one purpose, and that is to act as a focus through which the psychic function is concentrated.
The deliberate concentration of attention necessary to read cards or look into a crystal produces in the operator a very slight degree or self-hypnosis. The result of this is not actually to increase the psychic power of the medium but to give them more prominence by decreasing the degree of attention focused on the physical world immediately around him. That is, there is a relative increase in psychic clarity because the focus of attention has shifted.
What occurs is the medium develops a habit of easy disassociation thereby losing his normal close touch with the physical environment. In this way he becomes more open to conscious psychic experience and aware of impulses reaching him from the psychic world. In reality, he is half way between the two worlds, and his consciousness stands precariously on a narrow bridge between them.
The instability of this foothold can explain the uncertainty and often dubious veracity of many 'communications' and explains why these messages are often a jumble of unintelligible and at times frankly nonsensical matter with, here and there, a very pertinent point jutting out.
The objection to the use of apparatus to focus attention is this it involves a process which, instead of leading us towards a greater degree of integrity, control, and self-awareness, such as is the goal in this work, it works in the reverse direction. It induces the tendency, as the mediumship develops, to a greater degree of unconscious activity and to a splitting, not a knitting together, of the parts of the personality. Many however, use and like methods involving paraphernalia, and will legitimately continue to use them because they give the results they are looking for.
As to the use of drugs, it need scarcely be said it is not recommended and can be very harmful, and a very undesirable way to open up contact with the unseen. They inevitably lead to a deterioration of the personality and leave the subject victim to the unpleasant and often terrifying experiences of the psychic hinterland.
I am more concerned here with studying the natural growth of psychic perception rather than with methods comparable to forcing a plant, with the result that it can only function under hot-house conditions. The use of apparatus or drugs may show us things in the unseen worlds, but it teaches us little or nothing about our own psychic make-up or the way it behaves.