A Summing Up

There are several ways of communicating with each other. Direct verbal communication is explicit and intelligible, but there is also implicit communication, whether emotional, intellectual or psychic. Direct communication is soon recognizable through the effects it produces on our feelings and minds, so that we become enlightened by the knowledge and the impact that the information has had upon us. We indicate our response in our attitude and behaviour, so that soon no one can remain oblivious of the consequence.

The psychic way of communication is typically implicit, for here the details are largely implied but not directly or plainly expressed in terms of reference that may be immediately accessible to everybody. Psychic knowledge is largely implicit, being virtually contained within the experience of a single individual. In the same climate of thought we may consider the faith of any of the world's great religious systems. On the whole, people who share a psychic awareness have a common sympathy; they are more aware of their own foibles and those of their friends, and they cease to be ridiculously censorious about the shortcomings of other people and far less judgemental. It is peculiarly right that a person with genuine psychic gifts should be called a "sensitive" rather than a medium, because sensitivity if properly cultivated can be of distinct value as part of the discernment of spirits, whereas mediumship thrusts itself in front of the assembled throng as it claims its ability to make contact with the dead (a dubious claim to say the least as well as being a thoroughly dangerous one).

For the psychic gift to be of real use to humanity, both it and humanity need to be educated. It must be delivered from the glamour of revelling in phenomena that seduce the soul from its work with God on behalf of a largely deluded humanity, so that it looks for any stimulus that takes its attention off the problems confronting it in the present moment and concerns itself only in its own comfort. Thus do many people who are psychically gifted behave, abusing their gift for purely personal gain, whether for money, power, social notoriety or sensual pleasure. Humanity has likewise to be educated to the serious issues around psychism: that it is neither mental delusion nor systematized fraud; neither primitive superstition nor the antics of a sophisticated generation; neither inevitably evil like black magic nor the casting out of malign spells, nor attempting to determine or influence the future by occult techniques. Psychism is much more commonplace than all this compendium of nonsense; it is simply a way that God has made available for us to come to him directly when we lose ourselves in the concern we ought to have for our fellow creatures. When we lose concern for self to the exclusion of all other beings, we come close to the Creator of all beings. When we cease to be anything we start to become everything, since to quote once more from Ephesians 4.25, we all belong to one another, as parts of one body.

It seems to me that no one devoid of a special psychic gift or sensitivity should get involved in the subject. If they are stalwart in their faith they will soon move to more fruitful fields. But if their character is weak and more suggestible - by which I mean open to suggestion or imagination - they may be dangerously vulnerable to psychic influxes from other people or even the general environment. Let me say at once that I do not feel in any way hostile either to genuinely psychic people or the subject of psychism in general. As an acutely psychic subject myself, much involved in the ministry of deliverance as well as counselling on a broader base, I would be denying something which I believe God has given me, if I were to avert my gaze from the subject. There are, however, many other gifts apart from psychic ones. Artistic ones come immediately to mind, as do also intellectual and social ones. In all of these there is some psychic component, but it is not the major one. Social skills certainly need a degree of intuition, which is not so far distant from a psychic sensitivity. Unconscious communication, which is how Jung defined intuition, clearly has much in common with psychic sensitivity, especially telepathy. There needs to be a firmer connection between depth psychology and parapsychology if either is to advance as much as it might.

As in all somewhat arcane (mysterious or hidden) matters, there is a considerable prejudice between those who are interested (nearly always a mark of some past experience) and those who are compulsively sceptical. In the latter group one may find many medical practitioners, psychologists, and even parapsychologists, who are out to prove that the subject is a completely fallacious one. To my mind the importance of psychic sensitivity at the present time is to keep peoples minds open to greater possibilities than pure materialistic science. What goes by the name of religion, on the other hand, is often pure superstition based on dogmatic teaching of a past era. Here once more psychic sensitivity can help the person to move beyond the assumptions and prejudices of their group, and enter fresh fields of enquiry. The person who is genuinely sensitive psychically is less likely to fall victim either to religious fanaticism or to some occult group manipulated by a demonic figure, whether masquerading as a human or one showing its true colours in the non-material realm of a spiritual entity. These show themselves by the powerful effect they exert on a person's thinking and emotional responses; in other words they interfere with the cognitive function in a dramatic and radical manner.