being the victim of one's own sensitivity, and opting for a “sensitivity bonus” to increase the joy of living.
So the first message of this course is that we are seeking to develop our psychic abilities not in order to become enslaved or driven by them, but rather to enjoy the value they can add to our lives.
The second message, then, is what to do about an over-busy intellect that keeps insisting “How can you see fairies when you know they do not exist? When irrefutable scientific evidence for the human aura has never been established?” and so on. This is the voice of reason, a very useful voice when you wish to stop things running out of control, but a real bore when it stops anything at all from happening.
Here again there is a puritan side to reason, when it says “I won't allow this to happen because I know it cannot be real”, but there is also a more playful side that can be just as inhibiting. This is the voice that gets so excited when something looks like happening that it rushes in to examine it—rather like the excited child who, having planted a seed, kills it by constantly digging it up to see if it is sprouting. This voice can say : “Wow! I seem to have scored a real hit with that bit of the tarot reading! So I wonder if I'm really psychic, or was it just that I picked up a subtle clue from the punter's body language?” Once you get into that frame of mind you can be so set on finding out “how it works” that you hinder any further results.
THE MAGIC CUP AND THE MAGIC DAGGER
So we need to encourage a different mindset, one that will allow things to develop without slamming on the brakes. To illustrate this mindset I will use an analogy based on a Cup and a Dagger—two so-called “magical weapons”.
The open, receptive attitude that seems to foster clairvoyance is analogous to the Cup, and it is very different from the Dagger of analysis. In the following exercises you will be encouraged to gather sensory data, to explore with all your senses, and I will encourage you to imagine yourself as a Cup, filling up with feeling impressions and simply holding them as a whole, just as a cup holds water.
What you want to discourage at this stage is the tendency in a scientific culture to behave like a Dagger that cuts things open to examine them and analyse into separate parts. For if our Dagger side is over-active, then all impressions get shredded before they can collect.
We are not abandoning the Dagger, simply telling it to wait its turn. First we need to gather impressions in the Cup, and only when we have got some results should we then use the Dagger to see if they were worth collecting.
EXERCISES FOR WEEK 1
The plan is to begin by increasing sensitivity in a way that does not present a direct challenge to reason. We can even catch reason unawares. Nor do we want to challenge the inner puritan that would disapprove of excessive sensitivity.
What would that puritan spirit think if it heard some know-all musical connoisseur say: “I simply refuse to go to that concert because the symphony they are playing should only be listened to lying down”? The reaction might be, “What a load of arty-farty codswallop! How can it matter whether you listen to music lying, sitting or even standing on your head?”
Like the angry young man quotation at the top of the chapter, it's an understandable reaction, but it isn't quite as rational as it might seem. Because, ever since the advent of stereophonic sound, it has become common knowledge that acoustics do vary as you move around in a room, so the position of the listener's head would actually make some small difference. What's more, the experience of music is not directly that of the vibrating atoms of air in the room, but rather how they are interpreted by the human ear and auditory system. Standing, sitting and lying alter the parameters of the balance system governed by the inner ear, and affect other factors like muscular tension and blood pressure.
So the position we are in must have some effect on the musical experience. The only question is whether it is too small to be noticed—can we detect the difference?
EXERCISE 1 : LISTENING TO MUSIC
So the idea is to go alone into a room and put on a piece of music fairly loud, then make a conscious attempt to hear it more intensely than ever before.
Try to extend your senses so you hear it not just in your ears, but feel the vibrations over your whole body. Give it your total attention—not a narrow analytical attention that separates out the instruments (like the Dagger frame of mind) and analyses the musical score, but rather a complete surrender to the sheer sound in its wholeness (the Cup frame of mind).
Do this for a while, maybe with different pieces of music, until you get a really good feel of listening in a different way, of experiencing the music as never before.
When you have done this to your own satisfaction, then proceed to answer the question: “Does this piece sound better standing, sitting or lying down?” In other words, you know rationally that there must be some difference, so are you able to detect it?
Experiment with that for a while and note your results with different pieces of music for comparison.
The idea is that we are trying to observe something that is very nearly invisible, but with the reassuring conscious knowledge that there really is something to observe. Unlike later clairvoyant experiences, this exercise does not challenge our scientific culture, but simply stretches it a bit to include experiences that it would consider to be trivial, rather than nonexistent.
EXERCISE 2: BEING A CONNOISSEUR
Now apply the same approach to explore your other senses. For example, assuming that you are not already a trained wine taster, see if you can make sense of the wonderful descriptions on the back of the bottle. Pour yourself a glass, sit in silent contemplation and sip the wine to see if you can detect the “sensational alchemy between the sweet flavours of creamy, soft red berries, chocolate covered orange peel and the fragrant, savoury woodiness which, on the palate, wrap themselves around the cool flinty core of this profoundly complex wine”—or whatever the experts say.
Once again, the inner puritan might want to declare “What a load of rubbish”, but remember that the person who came up with this rubbish is probably a highly-trained and paid expert. Again, there must be something in it, but is it something we can tune ourselves to detect?
The sense of smell is a tricky one for many people. You might for example take a selection of perfumes and, instead of asking the simple question “Do I like this perfume?” try something subtler, such as “What sort of occasion would be right for this perfume and what would be wrong?” or “What sort of person should wear this perfume and who should not?”
Sight is difficult for a different reason. Many people are so visual that they have ingrained habits of seeing that are hard to shift. If you take drawing lessons the teacher might well begin with exercises to make you look at things in a new way, seeing them as if for the first time. Rather than try to compete with that, I suggest you move on to the next exercise…
EXERCISE 3: THE SENSUAL AWARENESS MEDITATION
Sit comfortably in an agreeable and not overly intrusive environment and begin by listening to the sounds around you. Do it in the same vivid, fully aware way that you listened to music in the first exercise, but this time you are simply listening to the ambient sound around you. Again, try not to engage the analytic (Dagger) mind that recognises individual sounds and names them, but rather be open (the Cup) to all the sounds together as if they were the totality of a piece of music.
When you have achieved a measure of success at this, move to each of the other four senses, one by one. I suggest vision next: see what is around you in
