ABSTRACT
An extreme sort of insight may be that type of impulse called 'enlightenment'. Sometimes, as with Gautama Buddha, the enlightened person goes on to found a religion. Sometimes, as with Descartes, it simply has a transformative personal effect. The author of this chapter imagines that the conscious mind suddenly becomes 'aware' of its new knowledge, but cannot evaluate it and does not know where it came from. Sometimes that conscious mind goes on to 'translate' its new notions into spoken or written language for other people, the author notes a few cases in which the acquisition of new knowledge seems to precede that linguistic translation. The planchette and the ouija board have been used many times in an attempt to obtain messages from some unknown world. A practised medium may be able to distract the conscious mind almost at will, so as to generate by 'automatic writing' a script that may have come from the unconscious mind.
