Do this, (1) when you touch the person in question; (2) when you receive a letter from him, which you should hold in your hand or between both hands; (3) when you hear him speak and (4) when you merely see him.

When trying these experiments, assume a “listening” attitude and breathe slowly and deeply. (This breathing must not be too conscious, so as to fake your attention, however.) Relax yourself as much as possible during this period. Try in the dark or semi-dark, at first, in the light later on.

When you are walking along the street, cultivate the practice of sensing persons, and seeing their aura. You will soon be able to feel a sort of air or atmosphere about each individual just as there is a definite air or atmosphere about a house or a town. Thus, a manufacturing town has quite a different “atmosphere” from one which is not. You will soon be able to get this, in a general manner.
After you have progressed thus far, you should endeavour to feel any cuts, bruises, pains, etc., which may be upon a person’s body. You should do this, at first, by passing your open hands gently over the surface of the body, and, as soon as you come to the spot which is sensitive and sore, you will feel a slight pain in your own hody in the corresponding place. Before you are able to do this with much success, however, you should develop certain phases of psychometry, as for instance the following.
Make a number of small paper packages, all exactly alike in appearance. In these place salt, pepper, mustard, cloves, nutmeg, sugar, cayenne, etc. Mix these all up so that you cannot tell which is which. Now practise feeling or handling these until you can tell the contents of any given package by merely feeling the paper in which it is wrapped. As soon as you have done this, you are ready for more advanced practices.
Having progressed thus far, you are in a position to try your first experiments in psychical diagnosis. Pass your hands over the body of your patient, (who should be divested of as many clothes as possible), and if your sensitiveness has begun to develop, you will feel a pain or some sensation in your hand or arm, or in some corresponding part of your own body, as you reach the diseased spot in your patient’s body. Cultivate this until you can succeed with more or less certainty and precision. The more you practise this, the more perfect you will become, and the more rapid your advancement will be.

When you have reached this stage, you must go one step further. Having located the seat of the trouble, and its general nature, you must seek to know how to cure it. Hold the mind in a receptive attitude, when doing this, and you will soon begin to receive the distinct impression that you must do something for the patient but you will not know as yet what it is. After a little time, you will get the distinct impression what to do to make certain passes or manipulations, to prescribe a certain drug, to apply certain water applications, etc. As soon as you have reached this stage, you are on the high-road to becoming a successful “spiritual healer” and your power will develop with every sitting. It would be well for you, at this stage, to sit by yourself especially for development in this direction; and added power will doubtless be given you with wich to work your cures.

One of the greatest difficuIties, doubtless, in the cultivation of sensitiveness, is how to distinguish true from false hallucination from reality. At first, this will doubtless be next to impossible, and many false steps will have to be taken before you find, from actual bitter experience, what is true and what is not. But as the inner sense becomes developed, you will find that it not only gives you the knowledge in question, but that it also enables you to distinguish one from the other true from false, and illuminates the whole subject so that mistake is almost impossible. This certainty, which you will then have, cannot be communicated to another; it is often impossible to prove to one who does not experience this inner vision of reality that what you receive is true, none the less!

This is the function of the Mystic Sense to do, aided by the full complement of inner faculties. In a measure the Mystic Sense, like the bodily senses, acts automatically, but like them it needs special training in order to separate phantasm from reality, to determine values, and to grade and classify ideals until they reveal themselves to be ordered unity, not less but more mysterious because more intelligible … to the whole man.” It is because of all this that long training in psychic development is necessary and sudden jumps or leaps into full possession of this knowledge is impossible.