Today, we will finish by looking at emotional powers and their development. We ended the last presentation by looking at how emotional sight could be developed. There was a right way and a wrong way. One way led to a temporary opening of clairvoyant sight, but this was lost when the persona, which had developed it, dissolved at the end of an incarnation. The correct way to develop this ability was to purify oneself so that the emotional envelope was cleared out of its lower vibrating elemental essences. This would mean a lower chance of attracting the loathsome entities found on the lowest three levels of the Emotional World. The single most crucial take-home fact is that this process of development should be under the guidance of a “master” and should be done very slowly. Danger and injury are all too possible unless all pupils are under proper training and are assisted and guided by competent teachers already accustomed to the emotional plane. That is why all sorts of horrible sights are shown to the neophyte as tests so that they may understand and become accustomed to them. Unless this is done, the neophytes might receive a shock, preventing them from doing valuable work and being positively dangerous to their physical body.
The first introduction to the Emotional World may come in various ways. Some people become sensitive enough to experience the presence of an emotional entity or some emotional phenomenon only once in their lives. Others find themselves increasingly seeing and hearing things to which others are blind and deaf; others again begin to recollect their sleep experiences.
When a person begins to become sensitive to emotional influences, they will occasionally find themselves suddenly overpowered by inexplicable dread. This arises partly from the natural hostility of the Elemental World toward humans because of Humanity’s many destructive agencies on the physical plane, which react upon the emotional plane, and partly from the many unfriendly artificial elementals bred by human minds. This has been especially noted in and near such a city as Chicago. Why Chicago is significant has been discussed in a previous series of presentations.
Some people begin by becoming intermittently conscious of the brilliant colours of the human aura; others may see faces, landscapes, or coloured clouds floating before their eyes in the dark before they sink to rest. The most common experience is to begin to recollect, with increasing clearness, experiences of the other planes acquired during sleep.
Sometimes, once in their life, a person will perceive, for example, the apparition of a friend at the point of death. This may be due to two causes, with the strong wish of the dying person being the impelling force. That force may have enabled the dying person to materialise themself for a moment, in which case, no clairvoyance is needed: more probably, it may have acted mesmerically upon the person, who probably has a higher sensitivity to these phenomena anyway, and momentarily dulled their physical and stimulated their higher sensitiveness.
A person with developed emotional vision is no longer limited by physical matter: they see through all physical bodies, physically opaque substances being as transparent as glass. At a concert, they see glorious symphonies of colours; at a lecture, they see the speaker’s thoughts in colour and form and are, therefore, able to understand the speaker more fully than without emotional vision. A little examination will reveal that many people gain from a speaker more than mere words convey: many will find more in their memory than the speaker uttered. Such experiences indicate that the emotional body is developing and becoming more sensitive, responding to the thought forms created by the speaker.
Some places have a greater capacity for occult work than others. California’s arid climate generates a highly charged electrostatic environment, which is favourable for developing clairvoyance. Some psychics require a temperature of 30˚C in order to do their best work; others do not work well except at a lower temperature.
A trained clairvoyant, being able to see a person’s emotional body, it follows that on the emotional plane, no person can hide or disguise themselves from what they are if viewed by any unprejudiced observer. It is necessary to say unprejudiced because a person sees another through the medium of their own vehicle, which is like seeing a landscape through coloured glass. Until they learn to allow for this influence, they are liable to consider the entity they view as being like them and, therefore, a thoroughly good person. Practice is needed to free oneself from the distortion produced by this personal equation to observe clearly and accurately. This is how someone like Steiner was led astray by the Dark Lords in the Emotional World. He assumed that anyone he communicated with must be an “adept” with a small “a” like him. More fool him. When you read some of the gibberish he wrote, like the Mysteries of Golgotha, you realise what a merry dance he was led on.
Most psychics who occasionally get glimpses of the Emotional World and most communicating entities at spiritualistic séances fail to report many of the complexities of the emotional plane, which are described in this series of presentations. The reason is that few people see things as they are on the emotional plane, until after a very long experience. Even those who do see fully are often too dazed and confused to understand or remember, and hardly anyone can translate the recollection into physical plane language. Many untrained psychics never examine their visions scientifically; they obtain an impression which may be entirely correct but may also be half false or even wholly misleading. Also, as we have seen, frequent tricks are played by sportive denizens of the Emotional World, against which the untrained person is usually defenceless.
In the case of an emotional entity that constantly works through a medium, their finer emotional senses may even become so coarsened as to become insensitive to the higher grades of emotional matter. Only the trained visitor from the physical plane, who is fully conscious of both planes, can depend upon seeing both emotional and physical planes clearly and simultaneously. Guess what you have to be to do that?
True, trained, and reliable clairvoyance demands faculties belonging to a plane higher than the emotional. The faculty of accurate prevision also belongs to that higher plane. Yet, flashes or reflections of it frequently show themselves as purely emotional sight, especially among communities of younger souls who live less frenetic lives. What is called second sight is prevalent among shamans of many indigenous cultures.
A person can be emotionally as well as physically blind. Consequently, on the emotional plane, using the faculties of this plane, they are still blind. At first, many mistakes may be made in using emotional vision, just as a child makes mistakes when it first begins to use its physical senses. However, seeing and hearing as accurately on the emotional as on the physical plane becomes possible after a while.
Another method of developing clairvoyance, which is advised by all religions alike and which, if adopted carefully and reverently, cannot harm any human being, is that of meditation, through which a very pure type of clairvoyance may sometimes be developed. A concise account of the processes involved in meditation is given in The Other Side of Death by C. W. Leadbeater and in many other books. Through meditation, extreme sensitivity can be developed and, at the same time, perfect balance, sanity and health.
The aspirant will readily recognise that determined meditation builds higher types of matter into the body. Grand emotions may be felt, which come from the Unity level (46) and are reflected in the emotional body (48). It is, however, necessary also to develop the mental and causal bodies to give balance. A person cannot leap from Emotional to Unity consciousness without developing the intervening vehicles. With feeling alone, we can never obtain perfect balance or steadiness: grand emotions that have swayed us in the right direction may readily become a little twisted and sway us along less desirable lines. Emotions provide motive force, but directing power comes from wisdom and steadiness.
There is a close connection between the emotional (48) and the Unity (46) planes, with the Emotional body being, in some ways, a reflection of the Unity body.
An example of the close relationship between the Emotional and Unity planes is found in the Christian Mass. At the moment of Consecration of the Host, a force rays out, which is strongest in the Unity World (46), though also powerful in the higher mental world (47:1-3): in addition, its activity is marked in the first, and second and third emotional sub-planes (48:1-3), though this may be a reflection of the mental or an effect of sympathetic vibration. The effect may be felt by people even far away from the church, a great wave of spiritual peace and strength passing over the whole countryside, though many would never connect it with the Mass being celebrated.
In addition to what has been said, another effect is produced as a result of and in proportion to the intensity of each individual’s conscious feeling of devotion during the celebration. As of fire, a ray darts from the uplifted Host and sets the higher part of the emotional body glowing intensely. Through the emotional body, because of its close relation with it, the Unity (46) vehicle is also strongly affected. Thus, both Unity and Emotional vehicles act and react to one another. A similar effect occurs when Benediction is given with the Blessed Sacrament.
That covers all I wish to say about the powers of the Emotional World. In the following presentation, we will examine clairvoyance in time and space.