For, although the dropping of his vicious habits will add nothing to his good Karma (which it would had his efforts to reform been personal, of his own free will, and necessitating a great mental and physical struggle), still a successful 'suggestion' prevents him from generating more bad Karma, and adding constantly to the previous record of his transgressing."

In regard to the modus operandi of "faith" healing, she further says:

"Imagination is a potent help in every event of our lives. Imagination acts on faith, and both are the draughtsmen who prepare the sketches for will to engrave, more or less deeply, on the rock of obstacles and opposition with which the path of life is strewn. Says Paracelsus, "Faith must confirm the imagination, for faith establishes the will. Determined will is the beginning of all magical operations. It is because men do not perfectly imagine and believe the result that the arts (of magic) are uncertain, while they might be perfectly certain.' This is all the secret. Half, if not two-thirds, of all our ailings and diseases are the fruit of our imagination and fears. Destroy the latter and give another bent to the former, and nature will do the rest. There is nothing injurious or sinful in the methods, per se. They turn to harm only when belief in his power becomes too arrogant and marked in the faith healer, and when he thinks he can will away such diseases as need, if they are to be removed at all, the immediate help of expert surgeons and physicians."

But perhaps the chief reason for abstaining from the practice of hypnotism, except in extreme cases, and under the restrictions pointed out, is our blind ignorance of the finer forces of nature which we are evoking. Thus, it happened to the writer to find that a subject, whom he had hypnotized merely as a pleasant evening's entertainment, appeared to become afterward a kind of reflector of his (the writer's) mental states and ideas. Let the writer be thinking of a subject, and his patient would allude to it; let him mentally hum a song, and he would be startled by hearing his unconscious serf immediately vocalizing it, etc., and all this with no desire or thought on the writer's part that this should follow.

A paragraph which went the rounds of the press some time since is very instructive in this connection. It is to the effect that a certain Spaniard, named Perez, arriving at Mier, Mexico, was immediately made the recipient of gifts of a varied character from people to whom he was a perfect stranger. Some of these were silly, as when the waiter removed all the bottles of wine from the other guests, and transferred them to the tables of Perez. Being threatened with violence, and called upon to explain, Perez admitted that he was a trained and marvelously proficient hypnotizer, which had become such a passion that he could not resist practicing his gift upon those about him. But it is evident from the account given that Perez often hypnotized people without himself being aware of it. And here we have a key to the states of consciousness portrayed in "Mr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," as also to that delineated by one who, we have many reasons for believing, founded his occult stories upon the basis of real occult knowledge, the result of a partial initiation into the mysteries of the East. This is the character of Margrave in "A Strange Story," by Bul - wer Lytton. It appears that the author makes Margrave himself not aware of the evils which his "double" plotted and carried into execution.

At any rate, we have the warning that, before one seeks to transfer his consciousness to higher and inner planes of being, he should first become "pure in heart," as it is only such that truly "see their god." For the farther one retreats within the unfathomable depths of his being, the stronger and more powerful for good or evil do the forces which he employs become; and this from a selfish, personal point of view alone, saying nothing of the immediate woe he may work through employing ignorantly such a potent factor as the human will becomes in hypnotism.

From all the foregoing it will be apparent how completely the facts of hypnotism sustain the hypothesis that the human soul is an unit center of consciousness, using many vehicles. Of these the physical sense organs are only required to enable it to come into conscious relations with molecular planes of being. It also brings out, with startling distinctness, the fact that these sense organs limit the soul's conscious area, instead of widening it, thus completely negativing the materialistic hypothesis of the conscious functions of the soul being the result of molecular or chemical activities in the body. Equally important is the light it throws upon the composite nature of man, and the relation sustained to his center of consciousness by the various "souls'" vehicles or Principles through which that center may manifest. But, of course, the crowning usefulness of a study of hypnotic consciousness is that in demonstrating the independence of the human soul of its physical organs it establishes as a necessary corollary the fact of its Reincarnation.