While sorting through materials at the Garrett Library I came across a fascinating Special Issue, Spring 1970, of The American Theosophist. Within its pages I read “The Psychic Experience” by Eileen J. Garrett composed of excerpts from her book Many Voices, which struck me and thus I in turn want to share with you.
I was interested and relieved for her sake to read Garrett’s statement “I am often asked if my psychic experiences ‘disturb’ my daily life. On the contrary they enrich it. I need to understand my own motivations and continually observe what can be the cause of the fantasies and visions that make me forever curious about everything. I have heard people with similar powers speak of themselves as being in the grip of something that leaves them helpless, and that others find them difficult to understand. I believe one can permit oneself to be set apart as being a little ‘queer.’ This has been true of great writers and thinkers through the ages, but I have never felt myself set apart. On the contrary, this extension of being provides an answering conviction that if one tries to understand one’s own motivations, one realizes that there are aspects in nature, happening all the time, that give us knowledge, whether we realize it or not, once we become aware of how to use them…
One simultaneously lives a separate existence, aware of a tenuous level of experience as one rubs shoulders with one’s fellows, while underneath there is a pattern that plays unconsciously and perpetually, a web many-colored and delicate, but filled with the awareness of what is happening to each and all below the surface…I suspect the world compels most of us to live ‘externally’ and therefore we have little time to comprehend the inner reality of the cosmos we inhabit. I may be accused of taking poetic license when I say I am aware of an intermediary field which contains us one and all, to hold our ‘signature’ so that we, as emotional beings, continue to add our stamp of personality to this unsuspected world within space. Perhaps one day this area within space and time will reveal itself to the scientific mind. Until it becomes apparent and measurable, we in parapsychology may remain outsiders—and perhaps suspect. However, there is an energy at work between each and all that binds us together as part of the animal family as securely as does the hive the bees. It is not outside of cause and effect as I perceive it, but it contains the ‘scintillating’ force that makes my physical universe as ordered in its course and as disciplined as heavenly bodies would appear to be ordered by natural law.
I believe this gift of exploration, born of inner curiosity and longing to be at one with nature, is part of the creative process of our life. One emerges with each breath as does the divine subconscious when a man awakens to focus his attention and consciousness upon bringing forth new elements, whether to produce a new bottle opener or a new theory of space. We move within this scintillating field from the moment of conception until we disappear from sight—though not from the eternal wholeness—to be lost within that dark atmosphere for which one yearns, and which is the inevitable change that takes place within each living breath.
Thus around us there is a field of force which includes all that the planet is. Akin to the sea, it is timeless and tireless in its momentum.”
I hope you enjoy her thoughts which leave me personally wishing I could have inherited her penchant for deep thinking! Enjoy what’s left of the waning summer months!