The faculty of clairvoyance indicates a loose connection between the vital body and dense body. During the epochs of our Earth's history in which all men were involuntarily clairvoyant, it was looseness of this connection that made them so. Since those times, the vital body has become much more firmly interwoven with the dense body in the majority of people, but in all sensitives it is loose. That looseness constitutes the difference between the psychic and the ordinary person who is unconscious of all but the vibrations contacted by means of the five senses. All human beings have to pass through this period of close connection of the vehicles and experience the consequent limitation of consciousness.

Two Classes of Sensitives

   There are, therefore, two classes of sensitives: those who have not become firmly enmeshed in matter and those who are in the vanguard of evolution. The latter are emerging from the acme of materiality and are again divisible into two kinds: voluntary and involuntary.

   When the connection between the vital body and the dense body of a man or woman is somewhat lax, the individual will be sensitive to spiritual vibrations, and if positive he or she will BY HIS OR HER OWN WILL develop his or her spiritual faculties, live a spiritual life, and in time receive the teaching necessary to become a trained clairvoyant and a master of his or her faculty at any and all times, free to exercise it or not, as he or she pleases.

   If a person has this slight laxity between the vital and dense bodies, and is of a negative temperament, he or she is likely to become the prey of discarnate Spirits, as a medium.

Invisible Helper

   When the connection between the vital and dense bodies is very lax, so that it may be withdrawn, and the man or woman is positive, he or she may become an Invisible Helper, capable of taking the two higher ethers away from his or her dense body at will and using them as a vehicle for sense perception and memory. He or she can then function consciously in the Spiritual World and bring back a recollection of everything he or she has done there, so that, for instance, when he or she leaves his or her body at night he or she takes up the life in the Invisible Worlds in a fully conscious manner, as we do here when we wake up in the morning after sleep and perform our worldly duties.

   When a person has this lax connection between the vital and the dense body and is of a negative temperament, entities which are earthbound seek to manifest here may withdraw his or her vital body by way of the spleen and temporarily use the ether of which it is composed to materialize spirit forms, returning the ether to the medium after the seance is over.

Mediumship

   Since the vital body is the vehicle whereby the solar currents which give us vitality are specialized, the body of the medium at the time of materialization sometimes shrinks to almost one-half its usual size because it has been deprived of the vitalizing principle. His or her flesh become flabby and the spark of life burns very low. When the seance is over, the medium is awakened to normal consciousness and experiences a feeling of the most terrible exhaustion.

   It is extremely harmful to any individual to permit himself to become so negative that his or her vehicles and faculties can be taken over by a discarnate entity, which is what occurs when a medium is "working." The entity can exert his or her control over the individual to the point where the individual can no longer exercise choice in any manner, but must live only as the entity wishes him or her to live. This control can continue in the individual's life after death, when his or her desire body can be appropriated by the entity. It is extremely difficult to break away from the entity once this has happened.

Children are Born Clairvoyant

   In addition to these various types of clairvoyants, all children are clairvoyant, at least during the first year of life. How long the child will keep its faculty depends upon its spirituality and also upon its environment, because most children communicate all they see to their elders and the faculty of clairvoyance is affected by their attitude. Often children are ridiculed for telling of things that, their elders believe, can only be the result of "imagination," and they soon learn to shut out scenes with engender such ridicule, or at least to keep these things to themselves.

   Thus we see that, although both positive and negative clairvoyance exist, it is only with positive clairvoyance that an individual can accurately see and investigate the inner worlds and advance himself along the evolutionary path. Negative clairvoyance cannot be counted upon as a reliable tool of investigation, often brings about the highly undesirable situation of personal control from an outside source, and can, at least among peoples of the Western World, cause evolutionary regression of the individual concerned.