Paul Brunton Philosophic Foundation homepage > Notebooks of Paul Brunton
The spiritualists use the term "trance condition" in a special sense. They think of it as a complete loss of consciousness, wherein a disembodied personal entity takes over and uses the entranced person's vocal organs to speak, or his hands to write. The medium's identity completely changes and becomes that of the purported spirit. Philosophy rejects such a condition from its desired goals and warns students against such dangerous states. What it seeks is not this negative passivity but a positive state wherein the meditator does not lose his consciousness but only deepens and widens it. It is true that the mediumistic condition resembles the meditative one in some respects, but not in the fundamental ones.
-- Notebooks Category 16: The Sensitives > Chapter 13 : The Occult > # 126