She wisely says that if in spite of you the selected mentally-visualized rose or violet rouses memories by suggesting a lost sweetheart, a vanished happy garden, or what not, you should substitute thinking of another flower which has no personal connotations for you. It must be some “peace-inspiring object,” even a spoon might suggest medicine. The reader will understand that we are now discussing the means for cultivating ability to fall at will into the state for telepathic reception; we are not talking about experiments with that end in view.
After considerable practice of this kind one will tend to fall asleep. It seems that it is right to nearly come to that point, but one must stop a little this side of the sleeping stage.
When one feels that some success has attended the practice described above, he may proceed to actual experiments. The amateur experimenter is advised at first to experiment in the dark, or at least in a dimly-lit room, as light stimulates the eyes.
She goes on to say what means that you should induce mental relaxation and passivity, narrow the field of consciousness. But at this point I must depart from Mrs. Sinclair’s precepts and recommend her own best practice. Her very first seven formal experiments were with her brother-in-law making his drawings some thirty miles away. The results were so remarkable that they deserve to arrest the attention of every psychologist. The next seven experiments were made with agent and percipient in different rooms, shut off from each other by solid walls; and their results also were very impressive. Therefore I see no reason why amateurs experimenting according to the light that they get from Mrs. Sinclair should not make their very first attempts in another room from the agent. Let the latter do as we find in the book was done; make his drawing, call out “All right” when he is done, and gaze steadfastly at the drawing until the percipient has made hers and signalized the fact by calling out “All right,” then proceed to make another and repeat the process. At least part of the time, let there be another person with the agent keeping watch upon his lips and throat muscles, lest the desperate theory should be advanced that at the distance of, say, thirty feet and through solid walls “involuntary whispering” on the part of the agent reached the ears of the percipient.
But how shall the percipient further conduct herself (we are here supposing the percipient is a woman) as the means of getting telepathic impressions? Adapting the directions given in the book, we should say that, lying on the couch with eyes dosed, and having sunk into that state of mental abstraction which she is supposed now to be capable of attaining, she is to order her subconscious mind, very calmly but positively, to bring the agent’s drawing to her mind.
And now we quote literally from the book, even to the expressions about making the mind a blank. Although not technically correct, it may be that to many not versed in psychology the expressions will be actually the best to suggest to them what they are to do.
Mrs. Sinclair warns that “the details of this technique are not to be taken as trifles,” and that to develop and make it serviceable “takes time, and patience, and training in the art of concentration.” There are special difficulties, at least in her case. In undertaking a new experiment what she last saw before closing her eyes again, particularly the electric light bulb which she lighted in order to make her drawing or drawings, appeared in her mind, and also the memory of the last picture. “It often takes quite a while to banish these memory ghosts. And sometimes it is a mistake to banish them,” a fact which we have noted several times in the account of her work. Another difficulty is to restrain one’s tendency when a part or what may be a part of the original appears, to guess what the rest may be, and to keep the imagination bridled.