Sensitives through whom physical phenomena (including materializations)
can be produced have been described, firstly, as persons in whom certain
forces are stored up, either far in excess of the amount possessed by
the normal man or woman, or else differing in quality from the forces
stored up by the normal man or woman; and secondly, as persons who are
able to attract from those in close proximity to them--provided that the
conditions are favorable--still more of the force, which thus becomes
centered in them for the time being. In other words, a sensitive for
physical phenomena is said to be a storage battery for the force which
is used in the production of physical phenomena--including
materializations--although it is by no means improbable that such highly
developed sensitives as those required for this special purpose may be
found to possess extra nerve-centers as compared with those possessed by
normal human beings. But whether this hypothesis be eventually proved or
not, there seems to be but very little doubt that "whatever the force
may be which constitutes the difference between a sensitive and a
non-sensitive, it is certainly of a mental or magnetic character, i.e.,
a combination of the subtle elements of mind and magnetism, and
therefore of a _psychological_, and not of a purely _physical_
character."
But why is a sensitive necessary? you ask. Think of a telephone for a
moment. You wish to communicate with a person who is holding only the
end of the wire in his hand, the result being that he cannot hear a
single word. Why is this? Because he has forgotten to fit a receiver at
his end of the wire, a receiver in which the vibrations set up by your
voice may be centralized, focussed, a receiver which he can place to his
ear, and in doing so will at once hear your voice distinctly--but
without this your message to him is lost.
And it is said that this is exactly the use of the sensitives during our
experiments, for they act as "receivers" in which the forces employed in
the production of the phenomena may be centralized, focussed, their
varying degrees of sensitiveness enabling them to be used by the
entities in other spheres for the successful production of such
phenomena, we are told.
And lastly, we require about twelve to sixteen earnest and really
sympathetic men and women--persons trained on scientific lines for
choice--all in the best of health; men and women who, whilst strictly on
their guard against anything in the shape of fraud, are still so much in
sympathy with the person who is acting as the sensitive that they are
all the time sending out kindly thoughts towards him; for if, as has
been said, "thoughts are things," it is possible that hostile thoughts
would be sufficient not only to enfeeble, but actually to check
demonstrations of physical phenomena of all kinds in the presence of
such specially organized, highly developed individuals as the sensitives
through whom materializations can be produced.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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