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W B Yeats – Anima Mundi

If you suspend the critical faculty, I have discovered, either as a result of training, or if you have the gift, by passing into a slight trance, images pass rapidly before you.  If you can suspend also desire and let them form at their own will, your absorption becomes complete and they are more clear in colour, more precise in articulation, and you and they begin to move in the midst of what seems a powerful light.  But the images pass before you linked by certain associations and indeed in the first instance you have called them up by their association with traditional forms and sounds ….

If you can suspend will and intellect [you can] bring up from the ‘subconscious’ anything you already possess a fragment of.  Those who follow the old rule keep their bodies still and their minds awake and clear – they seek to become, as it were, polished mirror … I was [only] seldom delighted by that sudden luminous definition of form which makes one understand that one is not merely imagining