Observations placeholder
Osty, Dr Eugene - Supernormal faculties in Man – When prophecy is wicked
Identifier
025665
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
This could be construed as issuing a death prayer, no wonder some mediums get a bad name
A description of the experience
Supernormal faculties in Man- Dr Eugene Osty
The following is a very distinct error of application, confided to me by M. Maurice R- :
In 1913, Mlle de B-, a metagnomic subject in the waking state, said to him, in course of a seance, that he would die towards the age of fifty, and described the scene of his death-the painful breathing of the dying man, whose respiration she imitated, his son bending over him, a woman at his side speaking English, all in a room on the ground floor, with a certain arrangement of furniture.
Four years later, in 1918, M. Maurice R- went through the whole of this painful drama on the occasion of his father's death, who died of pneumonia, aged about fifty.
The conscious mind of the sensitive, perceiving a scene conformable to a future event and having had no indication fixing its relation to another person, thought it must refer to Maurice R-.
If errors of application are somewhat rare, errors of time are much more common ; for except in the few cases in which mental representation or automatic expression of a date and a number of days or years arises spontaneously, the sensitive has to estimate time, both as to its mode and extent, by interpreting the artifices of the imagination, variable in different sensitives and always of doubtful import.
M. de Fleuriere, for instance, derives his ideas of time by vision on a semicircular screen on which the events of a life are symbolically projected. The events pertaining to the present are in the middle, straight before the eye, those of the past to the left, and those of the future to the right; and the distances from the centre indicate their approximate position in the life. Mme Morel, as we have seen ante, knows that an event is in the past when her informative hallucinations are, as it were, behind her ; a present event is at her side and a future one in front, all in a perspective corresponding to some sort of spacing in time. This symbolism, however, suffices so well to her conscious interpretation that during twelve years I have never known her place an event in the wrong mode of time. But the imaginative processes of other sensitives are less reliable.
Not infrequently they state past or future events as present. I have mentioned (p. 180) how Mme L.-F-, in May, 1912, thinking to give the nature of my professional employment at the moment, described what took place in the war between August, 1914, and July, 1916.