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Supernormal faculties in Man- Dr Eugene Osty

If the experiments are properly conducted, the percipient, from seance to seance, remains equally ignorant of the life presented for cognition; he is the same psychic instrument put to work in the same way and only affected by his own relative conditions.

 It is otherwise with the personality cognized, who has lived between seances for weeks or months, changing according to the pressure of outside circumstances and under his own mental evolution.

Many modifications, sometimes very important, have taken place in himself and his environment; the future has become the past and many anticipations have been realized or have been found illusory: in short, though the same individuality is presented to the percipient, the personality has been modified by all that the senses have registered, by all the know ledge that conscious and subconscious thought has brought into knowledge, modified also by new desires, new projects, judgments, tendencies and new modes of reaction.

 It cannot be said that these variations in the person cognized at each seance determine the new tenor of the premonitory information, they certainly do not, since precognition deals with things not yet registered, with that which is imperceptible by the senses, with things unknowable by reason and often opposed to anticipations.

But what we can say, and what experiment constantly shows, is that each new section of life that has been lived through gives a new starting-point for metagnomy from which it can better discern the next events in the stream of existence and that what is known collaborates in organizing the premonition of what is unknowable by reason.

 It is not without astonishment that at each seance we observe that the percipient, envisaging the future only, does not speak of the phases of life recently passed through that he perceived as future in the previous séance: or, that if he happens to speak of them, he places them unerringly in the past.

He seizes also the diverse preoccupations and organic disturbances, the projects recently formed and never before announced by him, and follows their outcome, linking to them and by them episodes near at hand in the chronicle of a life.

The source of the inspiration is revealed when the desires of the moment-projects and anticipations reached later, which are but passing states of mind and will never become concrete realities in the future-introduce error in the metagnomic output.

This error, obviously transmitted from the one psychism to the other, is corrected and disappears from subsequent seances, but only after these corrections have been made in the personality under observation.