Crystal Gazing, Its History and Practice

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II VISION AND VISIONS Real things? Unreal things or hallucinations ?Automatisms?After images?Mental pictures ? Illusions hypnagogiques ? Illusions proper?Reversible pictures The subject of vision and its varieties has already been dealt with in the volume on Thought Transference, apropos of the...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II VISION AND VISIONS Real things? Unreal things or hallucinations ?Automatisms?After images?Mental pictures ? Illusions hypnagogiques ? Illusions proper?Reversible pictures The subject of vision and its varieties has already been dealt with in the volume on Thought Transference, apropos of the experiments in crystal gazing, but it will be necessary to consider the questions in greater detail here, where we are dealing specifically with visual impressions, whether real or otherwise. To the ordinary man who does not concern himself with metaphysical subtleties the things he sees are real when other people see them too, or when he himself can touch them or in some other way check the accuracy of the information supplied him by the sense of sight. It is true that we may suffer from hallucinations which affect two senses; as we shall see later it is possible for a scryer (or crystal gazer) to see the lips of his vision people move and at the same time hear what they say; he thus suffers from both auditory and visual hallucinations. Again, the test that more than one person sees a thing is apt to work out wrong in practice. Not only may two people see the same crystal vision (a case related by Mr Lang is very much to the point?two sceptics both saw an old lady, greatly to their disgust), but we need go no further than such a common failing as colour blindness to see that the test of common agreement may mean common agreement in a mistaken view of things; for the perceptions of the colour blind are every bit as real to them as those of the normal sighted are to them; and if we admit that half-a-dozen people are justified in regarding their perceptions as unquestionably real because they agree among themselves in their descriptions of what they see, half-a-do...