Page:Occult Japan - Lovell.djvu/387

Rh. The consciousness in the entranced state throbs with the sense of this new personality as waking life does with the sense of self. Consequently, all the possessed's thoughts, words, and actions conform to it; none that do not finding foothold in his mind. The man does not simulate the spirit or the god. Mentally, he is the spirit or the god, and his mechanism, in so far as in him lies, responds in its performance. His is anything but a case of acting; it is an absolute change of identity, the new ego being the man's conception of the god. Such may not be the god, but it also is not the man.

From all this, we perceive a certain parallelism between trances and dreams, with certain divergences. In both the mind is inac tive, except along a particular line. In both the illumination is lightning-like, and in both no general illumination resulting in a general judgment of things as they really are takes place, because of the current's failure to rouse side-thoughts. But in the trance the dominant idea is much stronger than in the dream, and persists through the whole of it as a ground for all other ideas. Especially is this so in the possession trance. And the