You must train, purify, organise, in order that the powers of the consciousness may show forth.

You will see very fully now why at the beginning I urged you to realise that the whole of these manifestations are similar in kind, so that when you find someone saying to you: "Oh! So-and-so is a psychic," as though that were to condemn the person; "Such-and-such a person is a mere clairvoyant," and so on, as though the fact of possessing clairvoyance were a disadvantage rather than an advantage; then the proper answer is: "Are you prepared to go the whole way with that ?" Many Indians do so (it is the point to which I said I would return); they say that the siddhis, the powers of consciousness manifested on the lower planes, are hindrances to the spiritual life.
And so they are in a sense.

The spiritual life goes inwards: all psychic powers go outwards.

It is the same Self in either case--the Self turning inwards on Itself, or the Self going outwards to the world of objects.

But it does not make one scrap of difference whether it goes out to physical, astral, or mental objects: it is all the objective consciousness, and therefore the very reverse of the spiritual.