Dion Fortune: How it works

Haven’t been posting. Writing another novel. This popped up, though, and I thought I’d mention it. This passage is from Dion Fortune’s novel The Goat Foot God (p. 365-6)

“…one expects psychic phenomena to be reasonably tangible and to have something of the miraculous about them. We’ve had nothing of that…. We’ve had nothing that you can’t father onto the subconscious if you have a mind to. nothing you could call evidential if you’d got any notion of the nature of evidence. But all the same we’ve had — or at any rate I’ve had, some pretty drastic experiences. I couldn’t prove them to anybody else, and I’m not such a fool as to try to; but I’m quite satisfied about them in my own mind. Anyway, whatever they are, subconscious, super-conscious, hallucinations, telepathy, suggestion, auto-suggestion, cosmic experiences, bunk, spoof or hokum, I feel as if I had been born again….”

“How do you know it isn’t all your imagination, Hugh?” asked Jelkes, watching him.

“I don’t know, T.J., and don’t care. It probably is, for I’ve used my imagination diligently enough over the job. But via the imagination I’ve got extended consciousness, which I probably should never have been able to make a start on if I’d stuck to hard facts all along and rejected everything I couldn’t prove at the first go-off. It’s no use doing that. You’ve got to take the Unseen as a working hypothesis, and then things you can’t prove at the first go-off prove themselves later.”

 

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