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THE SCIENCE OF BREATHING
passing through the right kind of discipline, I earn that power, it is my rightful possession. In India the way in which these powers are exercised is first of all, the person who exercises them is in a perfectly conscious, positive state ; he is not controlled by anything but himself, retains his own nature and knows all the time what he is, what he is doing, and what other things are going on around him. This is the difference between the Western medium and the Eastern adept, that the western medium is controlled, the other the controller. There are certain states in which we see more than we see under other conditions. However, taken as a whole, this difference is to be found always. I met a medium in one of the largest cities in this country, and I was invited by her to come to a *seance. She claimed to be controlled by a Hindu spirit, and the name given was a Hindu name, and when she began to say something to me she uttered some words in an unknown tongue, two of which were familiar to me ; but they were not of the Hindu but of the Mahammedan tongue, of which no Hindu person, spirit or divinity would ever make use; these words are peculiar to the Mahammedans. The medium might have read these words somewhere as coming from India, and concluded that they were Hindu words. That solved the whole matter to me in her case.
* A sitting for consideration; here a meeting of spiritualists and their dupes to receive their so called communications from the unseen world.
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