VALIDATING THE VOICE
Come to the edge. / We might fall.
Come to the edge. / It's too high!
Come to the edge. / And they came
and he pushed / and they flew…
—CHRISTOPHER LOGUE
I stood in front of my closet in turmoil. I had no idea what would be appropriate to wear to the meeting. It didn't occur to me that I could just be myself, wear whatever I liked. Instead, I saw my mother's eyes checking me out from head to foot. “It's such a shame,” I could hear her saying. “You're so beautiful and you don't show it off.” I always battled with my mother over clothes. She was an impeccable dresser in her sleek silk Chanel suits and luxurious Armani coats. She always wanted me to wear dresses. But I liked jeans, especially one particular pair with a big hole in the left knee. I used to put them on day after day, and it drove her crazy. Some nights I even slept in them, as an act of rebellion.
I stared blankly at my wardrobe. I wanted to be comfortable but more important, I wanted to fit in. So a few hours later, wearing a red-and-white-plaid sleeveless dress that I'd bought with my mother at Saks, beige nylon stockings, and black Capezio pumps, I walked past a row of purple jacaranda trees into the B-floor lobby of the Neuropsychiatric Institute. Having tied my shoulder-length brown hair into a ponytail to make it seem less wild, I looked like I'd just stepped out of Mademoiselle magazine and couldn't have felt more awkward. Since at that time my stereotype of a psychic was a carnival Gypsy in a colorful dress reading a crystal ball, or a man dressed in white wearing a turban, I was well disguised.
When Jim first suggested I see Dr. Moss, I lay awake for hours that night, listening to the unusual downpour of summer rain against the bedroom windows. I couldn't stop thinking. Not only was Jim taking me seriously, there was actually an expert at a reputable university who studied psychic occurrences. I wondered how it would feel to get some real help. Even to contemplate such a possibility was to turn on a very bright light in a room that had been dark my entire life, a light that was now chasing away my worst fears. At last I saw the possibility of breathing easily, of finally being myself.
The following day I'd called Jim and agreed to meet with Dr. Moss, although a week passed before I actually saw her. In the interim, I rode a roller coaster of emotions. Jim sent me a copy of an article from the Los Angeles Times that presented Dr. Moss as a forerunner in her field, a maverick scientist willing to investigate areas that more traditional psychologists shunned. But after reading the article, I got a sinking feeling in my stomach. Why would such a respected researcher be interested in meeting with me? I became paralyzed with self-doubt. Maybe I should just forget the whole thing. But I couldn't. I was too intrigued, too curious, too hungry for guidance. Still, I felt split: excited by the prospect that she might understand me, and also desperately afraid of being let down.
I'd awakened on the day of our meeting with a sense of optimism that was new for me, but by the time I reached UCLA, my confidence once again was shaken. It was ten in the morning and already in the nineties. With the previous night's rains, the city had turned into a gigantic steam bath. The building that housed Dr. Moss's office, the Neuropsychiatric Institute (NPI), was a huge, coldly impersonal eight-story medical center surrounded by the college campus. As I wandered through the long, sterile halls feeling alone and frightened, I doubted I'd ever find the answers I needed.
Dr. Moss, who met me at the door, was a commanding presence. Looking to be in her midforties, about five foot three, with short dark hair and deep brown eyes, she conveyed a strong will and passionate belief, a capacity for being totally present in the moment, and a sense of focused attention and dedication. Dressed like a cover girl, I felt like a naive kid next to this professional in her white lab coat, but she welcomed me into her office with an inviting smile. My heart was racing and I was very much on edge as she asked me to sit and then did her best to put me at ease. She obviously recognized how self-conscious and tense I was, so we chatted for a few minutes until I began to calm down.
“Thanks for coming,” she said. “I've spoken with Jim on the phone and I'd like to test your psychic abilities with a technique known as psychometry. Do you know what that is?”
“No,” I answered.
“It's the capacity to hold a physical object and receive specific information about people, places, and events to which it's related,” she said, handing me a set of keys. “Hold on to these and relax,” she continued in a quiet, comforting voice. “Just stay open to any impressions that might enter your mind.”
I'd never done anything like this before, but I followed her directions.
“Close your eyes and concentrate on the keys,” she said. “Describe whatever comes to you, no matter how unusual it might seem. I'll be taking notes but try to think of me only as an impartial observer. I won't react or give you any feedback until the end.”
As she spoke, the stillness around Dr. Moss became more profound. My body, following her lead, relaxed, and my anxiety began to fade.
I hesitated at first, and then I heard myself say, “These are house keys. Your house keys.” Her facial expression was impossible to read. My attention wavered and I found it difficult to keep my mind on the keys. Then, gradually, a distinct image came to me. I saw a colonial-style house in a hilly neighborhood, perhaps a canyon. I was about to relate this to her when my critical mind quickly censored the image, telling me that I was just picturing a house I'd noticed somewhere in the past—there were many of this type scattered throughout L.A. What I observed could easily have been no more than a random memory.
“I'm not getting much of anything,” I told Dr. Moss, convinced it was safer to say nothing rather than to risk making a mistake.
“That's okay. Just say the first thing that comes into your awareness. Don't worry about being right.”
“I'm not sure,” I replied hesitantly, deciding to risk it. “I just see a house with pillars in front of it. Faded white or maybe beige.” While I didn't know if I was imagining the house or if it was real, my uncertainty was chipping away at my enthusiasm.
“Stay with it,” she said, in the same neutral tone. “Pretend I'm not even here.”
I desperately wanted a sign that I was on the right track, at least a little support or validation, yet none was forthcoming. I closed my eyes, about to give up, but what then came to mind was a memory I hadn't thought about for years. As a teenager, whenever life became difficult, I climbed to the top of the largest pine tree on our block. From the highest branches, I had a panoramic view of Westwood. Safely hidden from sight, I'd observe the city all the way from the high-rise Wilshire Boulevard condos in the east to the tall Bruin movie theater rower at the center of the village. Thus, when I wanted to be alone, to get away from everything, I often retreated to this protected place in my daydreams.
As I remembered this special spot, my tension seemed to disappear and my body softened. Then, slowly, the images began to shift, one flowing effortlessly into the next. Within moments I was standing once more in front of what I was sure was Dr. Moss's home. I knew I was awake, yet unlike a daydream, the scene was startlingly realistic. The strangest part was that I was acutely aware of being at both her home and her office at the same time, equally present in each. It was as though two separate realities were being superimposed one upon the other, a notion that intellectually seemed impossible yet at some deep level felt almost second nature.
As I moved closer to the entryway, I was astounded by the detail I was able to pick up. “I see a front door with a small window in it.” I focused on the façade of the house, and more images appeared, as if I were watching a slow-motion movie. With my eyes shut, the darkness provided a backdrop upon which each image was projected. But it was a very different experience from ordinary sight. A picture would appear upon the backdrop, frozen for a second or two as I viewed it. Then another would follow. I examined each of them closely, noticing subtle variations that in real life I would have missed. I was awe-struck by how rich these images were; they seemed to have a life of their own, like images in a brightly painted landscape or portrait.
Soon my senses began to get overloaded: What I was seeing became almost too much to absorb. Abruptly, my logical mind took over and I started to analyze the images self-consciously rather than letting them flow, and the more I analyzed them, the fewer new impressions I got. Finally, they all faded and I fell silent, opening my eyes and glancing around the room. Dr. Moss asked me what had happened.
“The house disappeared,” I conceded in frustration. I wanted to stop, to admit I wasn't capable of doing what she asked.
“Don't worry,” she said, gently urging me to go on. “Take a moment to relax. Breathe deeply. Quiet your thoughts and then visualize yourself back at the house again, as if you're really there. Stay aware of any smells, sights, sounds, or images you pick up. But don't force them. Notice what they are and then let them go.”
Once back in the silence, I found myself on a porch. “There are beautiful shrubs everywhere. The scent of jasmine is filling the air, and I can hear the sound of a lawn mower in the distance.”
Dr. Moss motioned for me to go on. Now I could hardly contain myself. Finding that I could reenter the scene at will, smell fragrances, and observe the landscape, design, and architecture of a house I'd never seen was like discovering that I could fly. The limits of my capabilities seemed endless. For the first time I knew there wasn't any reason to be afraid. I felt restored, vindicated, determined never to allow this experience to slip away. Eager to go on, I opened the front door and stepped forward into the living room.
“The house is nicely furnished but not lavish by any means. It isn't occupied,” I continued. “I hope I don't run into anyone. I don't want to intrude.” There were no signs of people, but I knew they were present. Dr. Moss didn't live alone. She had children, one or maybe two, and I had a feeling that other close relatives visited her a lot. There was a warmth, a family atmosphere. This surprised me; I guess I thought she worked all the time. It wasn't how I imagined her life to be, but I related it to her anyway, trying hard not to confuse my preconceptions with what I was actually seeing.
It had never occurred to me previously that I could consciously direct or focus my premonitions, looking at details the way I did in real life. Usually my visions had appeared unpredictably, in a flash, giving a general overview of a situation, then vanishing. The possibility that I might be able to turn my head left or right to explore various aspects of a room, for instance, or even choose to float above it, seemed incredible. I had entered an entirely new world.
I then found myself standing in the center of a large bedroom. “I'm now on the other side of the house but I haven't walked a single step to get there,” I told Dr. Moss, trying to convey my delight as I continued to look around. “I see a wide, double bed with a wooden headboard and a light-colored bedspread. On both sides of the bed are identical wooden tables.
“The right one has a single drawer where you've put some notes you've written to yourself. On the wall opposite the bed are two large windows. Between them is a long dresser that stands about waist high. There's an old faded photo on the top—it looks like you with your arm around a bright-faced teenage girl. Off to the right of that wall is a closet with your clothes in it. You left the door open.”
Now immersed in the reading, I forgot where I was. My only reality was the house, its rooms and hallways, scents and colors. All my previous concerns had been replaced by an intense curiosity to absorb each moment of this experience, as if I'd been starving for it my entire life.
When, finally, Dr. Moss told me it was time to stop, I felt incredibly invigorated. Whatever I'd been doing seemed natural—preferable, in fact, to my ordinary life. So preferable, actually, I suddenly realized that a part of me didn't want to come back, wished I could stay there forever. I began to feel a wrenching sensation in my stomach, a sense of loss, a sadness, as though I'd been taken from my home.
Perhaps because she sensed what I was experiencing, to reorient me Dr. Moss asked that I take a few deep breaths, begin to feel my arms, my legs, my toes, and then prepare to leave the house and return to her office. This gave me some time to catch up and get my bearings. Finally I opened my eyes and looked around. Dr. Moss sat quietly at her desk, smiling warmly. Even so, it took a few minutes to acclimate myself. It was like the lingering sensations of an extraordinary dream as you wake up, having part of yourself in both realities but being fully present in neither.
“How did I do?” I inquired cautiously at last, scared to hear Dr. Moss's response.
Leaning closer, she answered, “I think you did remarkably well. For the most part, your reading of my home was quite accurate.”
Her words caught me off guard. I could hardly speak. In effect I heard her saying, “You're all right. In fact, you've always been all right. There's never been anything to worry about.” I felt liberated, light, as if I'd won a race when nobody believed in me. But no one could dispute it; I had won, even when I hadn't believed in myself.
“You mean I'm clairvoyant?” I asked.
“Well, that's often used as another word for ‘psychic,'” she said. “So yes, you are.”
I tried not to look too excited. I didn't dare reveal any of my insecurities to Dr. Moss, but I'm certain she was aware of them. Wisely, she didn't press me to open up. I guess she knew I needed time for everything to sink in. In a scholarly tone, she proceeded to give me feedback on the reading, minimizing how phenomenal the whole situation was. In this, Dr. Moss was similar to many other scientists, striving to be objective by putting emotions on hold. To hear her discuss what had occurred, I could just as well have been sitting in algebra class listening to a teacher review the principles of a new theorem.
As she went on, Dr. Moss validated every significant specific I had described in her home. “It's quite common for psychics to pick up an exceptional amount of detail,” she informed me. “In fact, many psychics have told me that in this highly receptive state, colors appear more vibrant and objects seem more defined and compelling than they do in everyday life. Nuances we wouldn't ordinarily attend to stand out with a crispness that isn't otherwise present.”
I listened intently, transfixed. Despite my youth and inexperience, Dr. Moss was treating me as a colleague, an equal, never using her credentials or expertise to place herself above me. Not once, however, did I mistake her understated supportiveness as a lack of enthusiasm or interest. Rather, I saw it as a sign of her professionalism. It was clear that she had a deep respect for abilities such as mine, yet at the same time refused to glorify them or present them as anything but perfectly natural.
I could easily have spent the entire afternoon with her. There was so much I longed to know. Questions arose from my childhood: What do these abilities mean? Was I responsible for the dire events I was able to predict? Also, new questions arose from our meeting: Can I direct my abilities? Is it possible to look into another person's life whenever I like? How lucky I felt as I listened to her responses, the intelligence of this quite human but tough-minded researcher. With practice, she explained, I could learn to direct my abilities, which were now in an unformed, immature state, and happened spontaneously without conscious control. But, she continued, when psychic abilities ate fine-tuned, one can look into a person's life if the person is open. When someone is closed off and private, she continued, it's much harder to pick up information about them. The key now was for me to practice and get feedback on my readings. Though all people had some degree of psychic ability, she felt I had a talent.
And then, as it was clear she had to proceed with her workday, she asked, “How would you like to come work as a volunteer research assistant and psychic here at the lab?”
Dumbfounded for an instant, I doubted that I'd heard her correctly. But there was no mistake. She wanted me to join her UCLA staff! I accepted immediately and we agreed to meet at the lab the next day.
At exactly eleven, there I stood, facing the NPI, a towering red brick giant looming above me. Two large automatic doors swung open, I walked through a large central lobby and stepped into the elevator. For the past twenty-four hours I'd been fantasizing how the lab would look. I'd envisioned it as a huge place that took up an entire floor, with phones constantly ringing off the hook. I imagined a staff of scientists, both men and women, all wearing horn-rimmed black glasses and white lab coats like Dr. Moss's, and wondered what they'd think of me.
I exited the elevator on the seventh floor, took a right turn, and headed down a long beige-tiled corridor until I reached Room 23-189. I stood still for a moment, inhaled deeply, and then slowly pushed open the door.
At first I thought I must be in the wrong place. I panicked. The lab was not at all what I'd pictured. Off balance, I tried to steady myself. Then I saw Dr. Moss waving for me to come in. I was so relieved that for an instant I had an impulse to jump into her arms and ask her to hold me—an appalling thought for somebody who was trying so hard to appear mature.
The lab was one big room, slightly larger than a good-sized bedroom. There were no high-powered scientists in white coats, nor were there any experiments going on. There were just two guys in jeans, roughly my age, organizing piles of loose black-and-white photographs on narrow Formica desks lining the far left wall. They smiled and said hello.
The lab centered around a huge rectangular metallic structure about ten feet square called a sensory-deprivation chamber. This is where they did the Kirlian photography, a technique by which energy fields around the body could be photographed and documented. The chamber, which had one tiny window that filtered out all audible sound and most of the light, was artificially lit from the inside and could comfortably fit about four people. It reminded me of a giant refrigerator and was sealed as tightly as a vault. I poked my head through the entrance and saw photographic equipment inside. Even though the air reeked of the potent smell of film developer, I liked this space. It felt mysterious, as if something secret were going on. The rest of the lab was basically functional with a few desks, lots of files, and two telephones. When I looked out the window to the left, I could see Westwood Village in the distance, and to the right were fringes of the UCLA athletic field in the northern part of campus.
Dr. Moss was extraordinarily warm. She insisted that I call her Thelma, and I couldn't help but feel at home. One of the men, Barry, poured me a cup of coffee and invited me to sit down. A psychophysiologist and psychic responsible for many of the research projects, Barry was short and slight, spoke in rapid bursts, and gave the sense that he was tuned in to realms others didn't perceive. He was offbeat, energetic, and smart. I took to him immediately. Indirectly, Dr. Moss assigned me to him that day. For the next few weeks I dutifully followed him around and watched everything he did.
The lab soon became a wonderland for me. It was a gathering place for scientists, scholars, healers, and specialists in parapsychology to share their research and theories. For the first time I had the opportunity to meet other people who were psychic. They were not aging crystal-ball readers wearing turbans with smudged red lipstick and rouge, but real men and women with real jobs who dressed and acted—most of the time!—just like everybody else. I felt like I'd awakened on a different planet, a saner one, where I wasn't a freak or a crazy person. It was as if I'd been initiated into a secret society only a few people knew about, camouflaged and protected by the conservative exterior of the NPI.
I was a kid at the most spectacular carnival I ever could have imagined; each ride was better than the next. Nobody there cared what I wore or who my parents were. And, most important, I was encouraged to become psychic, as outrageously psychic as I could be, without any restrictions or rules. Besides what I'd felt with Jim and Terry, I'd never experienced such unconditional acceptance before. Everyone I met, everything I saw, including healings, Kirlian photographs of energy fields, and psychic spoon-bending demonstrations, brought me one step closer to myself and everything that had been untapped in my own heart.
Though it had now been years since my parents and I discussed my premonitions, it seemed that this aspect of my life, under the auspices of the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute, wasn't as untenable to them. Their change of attitude was gradual, but universities were a familiar world they respected. Although I was studying phenomena conventional scientists didn't condone, if both Jim and UCLA approved of what I was doing maybe it had some merit. Since even my childhood premonitions were now being defined in an academic context, they became more acceptable: My mother began to speak about them once again and my father actually showed a visible interest. Compared to my being on drugs or drifting from job to job or dropping out of college, of course, they thought this was an improvement. As for Thelma, though my parents were skeptics, they were willing to keep an open mind about her work, mostly because she was a clinical psychologist.
Overall, I was relieved by their reaction, though still cautious. We took it slow, but my parents and I were beginning to trust each other. Nonetheless, my mother's response continued to possess a spin that made it less credible for me. She'd say that my childhood psychic experiences were “something I don't understand,” and she would again and again convey her fear that they would preclude me from fitting in, that others would deem me crazy. My mother believed in the importance of observing social norms, and she valued the opinion of the medical community. I knew that. Even so, I sensed that some other truth was being withheld. In any case, now I was a “research assistant” at NPI, something, it seemed, we could all live with.
Despite this validation, I didn't approach being at the lab with an attitude of deadly seriousness. I viewed the whole thing more with a sense of play. I didn't scrutinize the events I witnessed nor was I overly critical of them. After all, when someone is released from prison after many years they don't question their own freedom. For me, the lab was a wondrous gift, plain and simple.
Before drugs and the accident, I used to dance alone in my bedroom at sunset. With my arms spread wide, I would imagine myself flying like an eagle high above the canyon floor or twirling wildly like a whirling dervish, uncontrollable and free. Then, when life got painful and complicated, I shut down. I'd now begun to open up again. Sometimes after a day at the lab, I would come home and turn on Miles Davis, Vivaldi, or the Stones, depending on my mood, and let my body move in whatever way it liked. With nobody watching, as the sun set over the ocean, I'd once again extend my arms and begin to dance.
I was being born, but birth is seldom easy. I needed all the help I could get. Thank goodness for Barry; he nudged me along. If it had not been for him I might have put off going to his special group forever. I really wanted to check it out, but the mere thought terrified me. Once a week, members of this group got together to develop their psychic abilities—it wasn't a lecture course where I could hide in the back row and just listen. If I attended, I'd have to participate and practice my readings out loud in front of everyone. What if I couldn't do it? Suppose I wasn't able to perform on command? Though I'd been successful with Thelma, I was afraid my reading was a fluke. It had just spilled out of me, but I didn't have a clue what I did to make it happen or how to repeat it.
“You don't even need to open your mouth,” Barry assured me. “You can just sit there and observe.” His promise of no expectations and no pressure eased my fears. I was hooked.
On a Wednesday night at eight, there I sat on a green vinyl chair in a large conference room on the C-floor of the NPI. At age eighteen, I stared at five strangers sitting across from me, and to my surprise they were all cute men, and even friendly. This was an angle I'd never considered—that I might like the other members of the group, or that it would be fun. I still generally viewed others as “the enemy” during this period of my life, especially when it came to dealing with my psychic abilities, and I was slow to believe that I wouldn't be mocked or shot down.
These guys were paying a lot of attention to me. It felt good and I began to relax. Barry introduced them: Jim, an ex-cop, who looked more like a male model; Kerry, Barry's colleague, who was wearing a pooka shell necklace and flowered Hawaiian shirt; Steve, a television writer; Dick, an astronomer; and Peter, a chemist. They all knew one another. I was the new kid on the block and they were treating me like a queen. It was amazing how much confidence the attention helped me muster; my silence lasted all of about thirty seconds and they even convinced me to be the first “sender.”
Barry shut off the light to begin, and the room became so dark I could barely see the outline of my arm. Then we all held hands. In the center of the circle were a microphone and a tape recorder to document our responses. Barry was the first to speak, softly leading us through a visualization to help us relax. I must have dozed off, because after five minutes passed, I jumped at the sound of Barry's voice.
“Send a name, Judith,” he instructed. “Choose someone you know very well, and hold that person in your awareness.”
He went on to say that the others would spontaneously relate any impressions they received about the person, no matter how ridiculous.
I followed the directions and spoke aloud the name “Geordie,” a close family friend I'd known for years. Then I sat back and waited.
There was a long silence that seemed to last forever. Predictably, my first thought was that I was doing something wrong. Then there was an outbreak of laughter.
Barry giggled. “I can't believe what I'm picking up. I see a can of Bacobits sitting on a kitchen shelf. I can almost taste them. Food. Food. All I can think of is food.”
Everybody laughed. For a moment, I tensed up, afraid they were laughing at me.
“I see an image of a big house,” Steve continued. “It looks like the Palisades or Brentwood. Not bad. I wouldn't mind living there myself.”
I began to let go, feeling less self-conscious, already blown away by the accuracy of their comments.
Jim spoke next. “I keep hearing a word repeating over and over in my head. It sounds like ‘Hummel' or ‘Himmel,' but I have no idea what it means.”
“I can see a picture of Geordie,” Peter offered. “He's a thin man in his midforties with straight brown hair down to his waist.”
For ten minutes they took turns giving their impressions until everybody was finished. Then we went on to the next phase: feedback.
Barry turned to me. “Rewind the tape, Judith, and play it back so that everyone can hear it. Please stop it only when the statements are correct.” This was a method of positively reinforcing the “receivers” whenever they had an accurate “hit.”
It had been hard for me to keep quiet during the reading. I kept stopping the tape during the feedback phase, because I could hardly believe how many “hits” there had been. Peter had seen Geordie pretty much the way he was: in his forties, with a thin build and long, straight, brown hair he often tied back in a ponytail. Steve had described his estate, which was in fact located in the Pacific Palisades. The word Jim had been struggling with was “Hormel,” Geordie's last name. But the most striking hit of the session came from Barry. Although Geordie was an avid vegetarian, his family owned a well-known company named Hormel Meats. They were responsible for producing canned products like Spam and other prepackaged meats. The Bacobits Barry had seen were right on target!
After this evening, I continued to meet with the group. Each round, we would trade off: one person sending, the others receiving. Week after week, we came to the NPI to practice, and those of us who stuck with it noticed tremendous improvements in our psychic abilities. Initially, during my first times with the group, I'd draw a blank when we did readings, though everyone else was getting images and impressions. Perhaps it was performance anxiety, or the high expectations I had after the psychometry reading with Thelma. Nonetheless, I kept attending and finally the images started to come, perhaps one or two at each session, and I would share them with the group. Sometimes they were accurate, sometimes not, but the important thing for me was that I got them out and that the group was supportive.
Over the next few months, I was able to psychically read names that were sent in the group and received feedback when I was correct. Deep inside, I continued to worry I might self-destruct if the psychic part of me emerged. But as it did, and as I saw I was still in one piece, and even feeling better than before, the flow of impressions increased. Occasionally, though, I'd hold back if an image seemed too weird, like the strange plexiglass-figurine maker I once saw, which I later learned stood in the middle of a carnival location Steve was sending. Such specific and unusual images, I was finding, turned out to be the most accurate, the ones I shouldn't censor. During this period, I also started having psychic dreams, my readings in the group became more accurate, both Thelma and Barry asked me to do readings as part of my work in the lab, and I began to sense information about friends that they'd confirm was correct.
One day, a man carrying a leather suitcase joined us for about fifteen minutes of a session and then left. He slipped in when the lights were out and, although we knew he was there, nobody wanted to interrupt the reading. We hadn't been quick enough to find out how he'd gotten in or who he was, and then he was gone. Later, we discovered he was an escaped inpatient from one of the locked psychiatric wards upstairs. That same night, he jumped in front of a car. While he was in the emergency room, he told the psychiatric resident that what had happened in the group made him feel unbalanced, hence his suicide attempt.
In fact he was a paranoid schizophrenic, unbalanced to begin with. While we were all trying to listen more closely to the voices in our heads, he was being overwhelmed by his own voices. Focusing on what we were saying was the worst thing he could have done; it only fed into his psychosis. He wasn't stable enough emotionally to enter into this work. We learned a hard lesson from this event. From then on, we'd carefully screen all participants, and no one with serious psychiatric problems would be allowed to attend the sessions.
A regular member of the group further confirmed our stance. Dottie, an editor at a film-production company, made some stunning predictions: her mother's heart attack several weeks before it happened, a friend's car crash, a big Los Angeles earthquake. Unfortunately, she became seduced by her psychic powers, saw herself as someone uniquely gifted, even chosen. Then she became afraid, obsessed with needing to know where these abilities came from. She wanted answers, but didn't like the ones we gave her. Although we believed there was a spiritual component to our work, we also held to the idea that prescience was a human capacity that everyone had and could develop.
Dottie listened, but was still convinced that her abilities suggested a special relationship with God. She saw herself as being like the prophets in the Bible. After speaking with a priest, she became so convinced she was hearing the voice of God that she turned into a zealot. Seemingly overnight she gave up her job, renounced her earthly possessions, and became a nun. The last I heard of Dottie, she was living in a secluded nunnery on the New England coast.
All these experiences, positive and negative, opened my eyes to the world of the psychic. Like other worlds, this one was imperfect, with a variety of difficulties and rewards. The more deeply I became involved, the more I was forced to release my romantic illusions about being psychic. Only then could I see these abilities for what they really were: a gift as well as a responsibility that could complicate life. When I watched people go off the deep end—growing too enamored of themselves, emotionally unstable, or spiritually obsessed—it became clear which roads had to be avoided. Psychics, I was learning, weren't perfect: They had the same problems as everyone else, and maybe some extras, too. Trying to integrate the psychic into one's life and maintain balance was no mean feat. If when I first came to the lab I tended to idealize the psychics I met, making them larger than life, then I slowly learned to avoid those who had big egos. In fact, most of the psychics I met dealt with their abilities humbly and with respect. The gift itself demanded such respect. Knowing things about others gave you no right to misuse the knowledge. When properly applied, however, psychic ability added richness, color, depth, and new dimensions to life. It also allowed me to know myself better, to appreciate others by seeing them—seeing into them—with greater clarity.
As I proceeded, the hardest part was to practice continuously with a group and to have them witness my failures. I hated making mistakes in front of other people, but I did it along with everyone else. It was the only way I could expand my capacity. At least in the lab it was all done with laughter and love, which made it much easier. Our group setting was ideal. The real test, however, would be putting the psychic to use in the outside world.
The more I practiced, the more my childhood came into perspective. My confusion and unanswered questions surfaced from what felt like a murky brown sludge hidden within me. Little by little, I dealt with it all. In the end, it was as if I were bathing in warm healing waters and finally emerging, cleansed and purified from the inside out.
I'd never thought much about ghosts one way or the other except for bad horror movies on TV. Although I clearly felt that the spirit of my grandfather was sometimes with me, his spirit had no physical shape, no human aspect. Every once in a while I would wake up in the middle of the night sensing his presence, but I was never frightened. I felt only love for him. On the other hand, ghosts in my mind were something to be afraid of—or a cliché epitomized by Casper—if I believed in them at all. I had to get beyond this stereotype, especially since one of my first assignments in the lab was to work with Barry investigating calls from people reporting “ghosts” in their homes.
The lab would get anywhere from about thirty to sixty such calls a year. Typically, someone would phone, beat around the bush, and then say that strange things were happening around them. They would describe electronic machinery going on and off uncontrollably, objects flying around the room, or noises they were unable to account for—voices or footsteps—apparitions, and lights. Interesting…not like their grandfather at all. But what was this? I couldn't wait to see.
One day, we received a frantic call from a divorced mother in her midthirties. She swore she had been assaulted by a number of different spirits in her Culver City home. Her sixteen-year-old son, in fact, said he walked in one day and witnessed his mother being bounced around like a rag doll by a force he couldn't see. Afterward they both noticed extensive bruises on her body that hadn't been there before. They were at their wits' end. When we privately interviewed her daughter and other sons, each said they had seen two apparitions inside the house. The entire family emphatically insisted that the figures had been too vivid to be anything but real.
After Barry first described the case, I didn't believe a word of it. It seemed hokey; I thought these people were either hallucinating or lying. In my mind it wasn't even worth investigating; they obviously needed some professional help. I suggested that we give them a referral to a psychiatrist and be done with it. My reaction was so negative, in fact, that I finally had to ask myself just what was bothering me so much. After all, I had been in the tunnel and had felt my grandfather's presence. Try as I might I couldn't articulate my mistrust clearly, but I did know that at the heart of my experiences was a component of love. The utter absence of love in this family's account made it distasteful to me.
Barry, on the other hand, agreed that it all seemed far fetched, but he wanted to check it out. Though he and Kerry, another researcher at the lab, suspected that the mother was emotionally disturbed, they decided to pay one quick visit to her house in Culver City. When they went inside, they later told me, cabinet doors in the kitchen appeared to open and shut of their own accord. And although their visit was on an extremely hot autumn day, the bedroom where the alleged attacks had occurred was as cold as the inside of a refrigerator.
During a ten-week investigation, Barry and other members of the research team found cold spots in various places in the house and an overpowering stench in one of the bedrooms. On several occasions, as many as twenty separate observers from the lab saw whirling balls of bright light flying through the bedroom. To eliminate outside influences, they hung heavy quilts and bedspreads over the windows, but these precautions only increased the brilliance of the light show in the darkened surroundings. Simultaneously, the register on a Geiger counter, which previously had been constant, suddenly dropped to zero.
At one point, the lights actually began to take shape, forming a partial three-dimensional image of a man. Unfortunately, although a battery of cameras flashed pictures of the form, no images were picked up on film. At a later time, though, after a particularly elaborate display, Barry photographed one of the cold spots in the bedroom. When the film was developed, in the center of the photo he found a ball of light about a foot in diameter.
Midway into the investigations Barry invited Frank DeFelita, who had previously done a television special for NBC on ghosts, to visit the house. DeFelita brought in equipment for documentation, and was lucky enough to witness many of the phenomena. (He went on to write a novel about this extraordinary situation, The Entity, which was later made into a feature film.)
My job on the project was to relate the psychic impressions I received while in the house. The greatest challenge was to distinguish my emotional reactions from a definite influence that existed outside myself. As a psychic, I was discovering how to separate the fine points. True, everyone present was tense and on edge. But also, apart from this, I sensed a buzzing and swirling energy, chaotic and disturbing, pushing in on me. Physically, it was a dull pressure, a tightening band around my head, fading in and out. The odd part was that within moments of leaving the house, I would feel this oppressive sensation lifting. Other psychics had similar responses. Unfortunately, though I'd been excited to encounter the lights and faces that many researchers had observed, I wasn't there for these occurrences. Barry and the others were staked out at the house, whereas I was only able to visit a few times. I learned that this type of phenomenon doesn't happen on command. You have to be there at the right time to catch it.
Aside from the question of what team members saw or did not see, many of our energetic perceptions were consistent. Furthermore, there was the house itself—dilapidated, twice condemned by the city—and the family, terrified by events they couldn't explain. Although they didn't complain, it must have been a burden, all these strangers in their home lugging around massive amounts of equipment. I barely spoke in a personal way with them; I simply conducted an interview about the facts. Actually, I was afraid to get too close, lest what was happening there might somehow rub off on me.
Barry believed that in the vast majority of ghost cases, even if the manifestations were authentic, they were misinterpreted. The unexplained activity, he felt, generally had little to do with a specific house. Rather, it was an outgrowth of the anger or frustration within a family, an unconscious by-product of human emotions that created physical manifestations (psychokinesis), such as objects flying around the room and lights going on and off. Just as the mind can affect our bodies, so too can it affect our environment. It was Barry's opinion that, for the most part, people are haunted, not houses. His theory was supported by the fact that when this family moved out of their home, the phenomena followed them. They, however—and others in similar situations—tend to be unwilling to accept the problem as a psychokinetic product of their own minds. If they did, they would be forced to take responsibility, to make the necessary steps to change. Most people who experience such disturbances, not surprisingly, would rather remain victims.
The experiences in this house, and others like it, were invaluable. They forced me to sift through and identify the true authenticity in circumstances that I would normally write off as sensationalized. Most convincing was the information I psychically perceived. I didn't know if the energy I picked up in Culver City was a ghost, but I was sure it was real—there was a presence there. Even so, as Barry suggested, it might have simply been an extension of the family's angst. Imagine what anxiety would be like if it were magnified a thousandfold and took on an external life of its own. This is what I was sensing. Still, as a psychic, I was in virgin territory, feeling my way. Visually I never saw much as I worked with Barry, but I was beginning to discern presences. Step by step, I was being primed to accept that many different kinds of beings exist—spirits included, a reality I came to embrace fully later on. For the time being, I wanted to keep an open mind, to view new situations without prejudging, to leave room for all possibilities.
This didn't mean that I was going to walk around with blinders on or ignore common sense. It's just that previously my psychic abilities had been discounted by well-meaning parents, teachers, and friends who were unwilling to accept what they couldn't understand. This had really hurt me. I was now determined not to repeat the same mistakes. I'd become so sensitive to people not listening to me while growing up, that I now made a special attempt to listen to others. There was nothing wrong with healthy skepticism, but I also sought to maintain a healthy sense of awe, and the humility to remember that there was much I did not know.
Complete silence. I could easily have been in a space capsule orbiting a million miles away from earth. If I listened hard enough, I could almost hear the faint sound of blood pulsing through my body. I was glad I'd brought my sweater. The maintenance people had once again turned the air conditioning on way too high. It was getting chilly in here; I had goose bumps on my legs.
Every Tuesday at four o'clock I would lock myself in the sensory-deprivation chamber and develop my Kirlian photographs. I've always had a touch of claustrophobia, so simply getting myself in there was a major accomplishment. The handle on the outside of the door, a big circular steel wheel that looked as if it belonged on a meat locker, had to be slammed shut with such force I was afraid it would never open up again. When the rubber lining inside the door hit the surrounding metallic frame, there was a horrible sucking sound. It felt frighteningly final. What if I were locked in there forever? Over time, I got used to it; the magic available within the place far outweighed my feats.
Thelma had assigned me a plant experiment in which I would use Kirlian photography to monitor the seasonal changes of five specific plants over a period of a year. I had been attracted to plants as long as I could remember, and I surrounded myself with them at home. My boardwalk apartment in Venice was a one-room jungle with flowerpots everywhere; plants were hanging from ceiling hooks, draped over the bathtub's rim, and took up every inch of floor and window space. I did more than talk to and touch them; I communed with them, actually felt their spirits. Nobody taught me how. I just started doing it on my own, a private habit that felt completely natural. Not surprisingly, I relished this chance to work with plants more closely. From my abundance of plants at home, I carefully chose a few to use for the project: a creeping Charley, a geranium, a ficus, an African violet, and a wandering Jew. I got to know each of these plants so well that I began to think of them as friends.
The first time I saw a Kirlian photograph of a plant, I was touched by its fragile beauty. It was even more beautiful than the human corona, which, in a black-and-white photo, shoots off the edge of a fingertip like the flame of a magnificent white fire. A Kirlian photograph of a single leaf reveals the details of its entire inner structure, each vein outlined by a border of tiny gray bubbles with a white speck in the middle, similar to the nucleus of a cell. When shot in color, these bubbles light up like a string of brilliant Christmas lights stretched out over the branches of a tree. The image is two-dimensional but appears to be in constant motion, contracting and expanding as though taking a breath. Filtering off the outer edges of the leaf is a radiant, purplish blue discharge, the intensity varying according to species and season.
The theory behind Kirlian photography is that it records a subtle energy field that surrounds all forms of life as well as inanimate objects, energy not detectable by ordinary means. This field extends as far as a few feet or more beyond the body and is as much a part of us as our arms or our legs. Some psychics can see it or feel it but most people can't.
The notion of energy fields sparked my interest and put into words something I had intuited for a long time. It explained why, as a child, within seconds of meeting someone I knew whether or not I liked them. This “knowing” wasn't about how nice a person was acting or what they looked like. Rather, it was a clear impression in my gut. At times I could almost sense invisible tendrils reaching out to me from a person that conveyed information about them. It would happen before we'd even exchanged a word. Some people just felt good; others didn't. I did not think to question myself until it bothered my mother when I made what she called “snap judgments” about her friends. She felt I wasn't giving them a chance, but I couldn't help it: What I felt was perfectly obvious to me. And later on, my initial impressions were often shown to be accurate.
At the lab, wanting to prove myself to Thelma, I set to work determined that the plant project be perfect. The photographic technique I used was simple. Once inside the chamber, I would place a single leaf directly on top of a one-foot-square photographic plate and press a button. That was all there was to it. Once the picture was developed, it was done. I would take about ten separate photos of the front and back of each leaf, compare the results, then mount them in a notebook. My recordkeeping was meticulous. I never missed a week. At two o'clock on Tuesdays, I would carefully collect fresh leaves from my plants at home, seal them in envelopes, and bring them to UCLA. I would then organize them according to day and month, with each species having its own separate section. Kirlian photographs in color are breathtaking, but they were far too expensive for the lab's budget, so my plant notebook was primarily done in black and white.
Doting on my plants, I felt like a mother watching her children grow, noticing every little thing. The days passed. I saw shifts. The leaves seemed to be bonded in some way, responding in unison to seasonal changes. During fall and winter, the energy fields around the leaves began to shrink, as though they were pulling into themselves. By April, a few tentacles of light would gradually extend beyond the body of each leaf, stretching out like the arms of someone who was awakening from a deep sleep. June produced the most dramatic changes when, suddenly, each leaf would bust open into a full bushy halo, remaining that way until September.
Plants, I noticed, reacted not only to seasons but also to people, their energy fields showing observable changes. One day a well-known psychiatrist from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore visited the lab. He was an unpleasant man, arrogant and loud. It was clear to us that he was closed to out experience: The purpose of his visit was to put down our research, not to learn from it. Thus we decided to play a little trick on him. First we photographed a species of ivy and measured the diameter of its field. Then, with a pretty good idea of what would ensue, we asked him to place his index finger beside the plant. Surprised, he watched as the corona of the ivy shrank to about half its original size and recoiled. Our sentiments about this psychiatrist matched the ivy's: At the end of the day we were all relieved to see him go.
As I became absorbed in the plant project, I also became frustrated with my inability to duplicate the “phantom-leaf effect” that Thelma had reported in her research. The phantom leaf was the ghost of the whole leaf or “energy imprint” that stayed intact, even though part of it was cut away. It was similar to “phantom pain,” which many amputees describe soon after the surgical removal of a limb. The arm or leg is gone, but they still feel pain in the place where it used to be. Month after month, I photographed at least ten different varieties of leaves but never captured the outline of the missing portion on film. Thelma said that some people just had a knack for it, that the phantom leaf had less to do with the photographic apparatus or the actual leaf than it did with some aspect of the photographer. There was a college student named Ron from UC Santa Barbara who was great at getting the phantom-leaf effect. He used to come down on weekends to work in the lab. Many of us had a chance to observe him—there were no tricks. Thelma said he had a gift; there seemed no other way to account for it. I agreed that Ron took some stunning pictures.
The longer I worked with Kirlian photography, the more I wanted to find out about it. For over a year, I would spend hour after hour locked inside the sensory-deprivation chamber. No human voices. No telephones. Just the distant buzzing of the fluorescent lamp above my head. Only the plants and me. I developed a rapport with them. When I placed my hand just over the leaves, I could feel an energy current running through them, palpable waves of heat, an increased pressure and mass, a buzzing vibration, that made my palm tingle even when I raised it as much as a foot in the air. Eyes open or shut, it was all the same. Eventually, with practice, I learned to sense these fields intuitively, without having to use my hand at all. By simply looking at them, I could accurately trace the location of the leaves' extended borders. At times I would see a golden glow around the leaves and correlate that with the feeling in my palm. But more often, the extent of the field simply registered in my body, a quite physical sensation.
There was no scientific explanation for Kirlian photography that parapsychological researchers agreed upon. It might have been true that energy fields were not photographed at all, that the beautiful pictures we were seeing were only the artifacts of something as mundane as the moisture content of the object on film. This, however, was less important to me than the psychic impressions I picked up during the Kirlian work. There lay its greatest value. Photographs or not, I was beginning to trust my own experience.
It was during this time that many things I couldn't previously explain started to become clear, like the afternoon in the airport when I was picking up so much sadness from the man sitting beside me that I couldn't concentrate on the magazine I was reading. I thought to myself, You're crazy. You're just imagining it. But when I moved to the other side of the room, the sadness disappeared. I'd always wondered why plants and certain people were so healing to be around. It wasn't anything that they did or said: It was how it felt to be with them. Through my plant research, I realized that when I was younger I hadn't been making things up, nor had I been trying to be “purposely disagreeable.” I was simply noticing qualities about people that others couldn't perceive. To a psychic, a person's energy field is as real as the scent of her perfume, her smile, or the warm red color of her hair.
This work had validated what I'd felt for a long time: There was more to human beings than their physical qualities. A palpable essence extended outward. Before, I had no way to confirm what I sensed to be true. But now another missing piece of the puzzle was falling into place.
A lot of talk was circulating inside the NPI. A well-known Israeli psychic, Uri Geller, had agreed to take part in an experiment at the lab. He was coming in a few weeks, and even the receptionist at the front desk had been grilling me to get the full scoop. Uri had made some incredible claims: that he could bend thick metal rods without touching them, that he could fix broken clocks with his mind. Uri was controversial; he stirred people up. Everyone had a strong opinion about him, all equally convinced they were right. Nancy, a clerk in Medical Records and a fundamentalist Christian, accused Uri of doing the “devil's work.” Jean, a psychic herself, was adamant that he was authentic. Stan, a skeptical pharmacologist down the hall, swore that Uri was a fake, nothing more than an expert magician who wanted to put something over on us. I didn't know what to think.
The day of Uri's visit the lab was buzzing, our small space packed with researchers, students, scientists, and other psychics who'd come to witness Uri's feats. It had gotten so crowded that we had to turn away anyone who hadn't specifically been invited. A friend of Barry's, the West Coast editor of Popular Photography, was there to document the event on film. The atmosphere in the lab was electric; we were preparing for a celebrity.
Uri arrived with the fanfare of a true star. He was a handsome man in his twenties with wavy black hair and large sparkling eyes, and he walked as if he owned the place, strutting around the room like a prize rooster at a county fair. He was charismatic in the most obvious way. Like a little kid starved for attention, he craved the spotlight and wouldn't be satisfied until it was his. Uri had a boyishness, and a seductive air; although I tried to resist, I was taken by his charm.
Uri started his career as an entertainer for the Israeli armed forces, touring the country performing psychic readings and doing metal bending. Andrija Puharich, a well-respected parapsychologist, saw him at a club in Tel Aviv and was so struck by Uri's ability to bend rings from a distance that he brought him to the United States. From what I understood, Uri's act had begun as a mixture of magic and true psychic prowess, but few could discern which was which.
After his stagy entrance at the lab, Uri settled into a chair beside Thelma in the far corner with a crowd of observers huddled around him. The experiment was scheduled to begin at one o'clock. Although I was riveted by his presence, his self-confidence disconcerted me. I was content to stand back and watch at a distance. But Barry grabbed my hand and led me up to the front to make sure I could see. As I stood there staring at Uri, I remembered having heard that his act in Israel included a psychic attempt at randomly guessing the color of a woman's underwear. It was a gimmick, I suppose, a way to get laughs. But I certainly didn't want him to choose me!
To my relief, the experiment started with a metal-bending demonstration. Thelma handed him an ordinary kitchen fork. He took the fork and, with great tenderness, stroked it with one finger, as lovingly as he might have petted a favorite cat or dog. Then, holding the fork high for everyone to view, he spoke to it in a loud, assertive voice.
“Bend!” he commanded.
For a moment, I thought he was joking. He was addressing the utensil as though it could understand him.
“Bend! Bend!” he yelled, perhaps five more times, repeating it like a mantra with sacred powers. Then, without emotion, he set the fork on the table. All eyes were glued to it, but nothing happened. Not at first. But then, suddenly, the prongs began curling inward until the fork had rolled itself into a tiny metal ball.
“I can't believe it,” I almost blurted out, but caught myself. I didn't want to create a stir by letting on how startled I was; I did my best to appear adult about the whole thing. The fork, however, was only a beginning. A consummate showman, Uri proceeded to bend the contents of a large desk, including a complete table setting of matching forks, knives, and spoons. Within an hour, the desktop was strewn with an array of demolished metal utensils that looked like they'd been crushed by a steam roller.
What do you say when your concept of reality has been seriously altered, especially by somebody as self-absorbed and attention seeking as Uri Geller appeared to be? Uri had defied both out expectations of the physical world and our skepticism about the authenticity of performers. I simply stood there speechless, my throat dry. Barry, on the other hand, seemed elated; he was talking up a storm. Stan, the pharmacologist, left as soon as the demonstration was over, declaring that we had all been tricked. He felt that despite the precautions we had taken to ensure the experiment's authenticity, Uri had used magic to deceive us. I knew that Uri had many critics—magicians, parapsychologists, traditional scientists—who would agree. Some went as far as to call him an illusionist with a panoply of tricks, ranging from chemicals, magnets, and presoftened metal to the purposeful misdirection of an audience's attention.
It was difficult to sort through the emotional uproar Uri created to evaluate him fairly. The general consensus among lab members was that Uri's talents were genuine. Ordinarily, I would have been put off by someone like Uri, but I ended up liking him. Despite all the hype, though he might well be a trickster, clearly he had a real talent, and there was a sweetness about the man. Although he went overboard to show off, I found it easy to forgive him. I guess I empathized with his need to feel special and be understood. Only a very short time before, I had been too frightened to express my psychic abilities at all, and so Uri's fearlessness and need to prove to the world what he could do struck a special chord in me.
After Uri left, Thelma gave me a bent spoon as a souvenir. I carefully placed it on the front seat of my green Volkswagen bus and headed for Venice, my head swimming with the day's events. I felt as though I had just swallowed several cups of strong coffee: wired, yet at the same time drained. But I had to shift gears and reenter my day-to-day life. My refrigerator was bare and my laundry had been piling up for days.
Bent spoon in hand, still a bit giddy, I trudged up the stairs that led to my second-floor apartment. Reconciled to an evening of chores, I reached into my pocket for my house key. I placed the key in the lock as I'd done hundreds of times before and tried to turn it, but it jammed. Something was odd. I flipped on the porch light and pulled out the key. It was the correct one, but, incredibly, the entire metallic body of the key was bent backward. It was useless.
My God, I thought. Uri must've done that. I shook my head in disbelief. Laughing out loud, I reached under the mat and pulled out another key, grateful that I'd hidden a spare.
Touching someone with the goal of helping or healing can do so much more than I ever imagined. I was familiar with traditional medicine; my parents were both doctors. Whenever I got sick, I would go to my internist, he would listen to my heart and lungs, ask me a lot of questions, and then write out a prescription. But he rarely touched me. No doctor ever placed his hands on my body the way Jack Gray, a hypnotist and healer at the lab, touched his patients.
I was told that Jack had performed a miracle. A young man named Mitchell had been in a near-fatal accident. A car collided with his van head on, demolishing it and shattering his leg in forty places. The ligaments and bones were so badly damaged that a team of orthopedic, vascular, and plastic surgeons concluded the leg would never heal. Infection was threatening his life; they recommended amputation. Unwilling to accept this outcome, though he understood the doctors were doing their best, Mitchell took an enormous risk. Through a combination of prayer, laying on of hands, and hypnosis, Jack effected a regeneration of the bone, nerve, and muscle tissue that the surgeons had deemed impossible.
I still had stereotypes in my mind of what psychic healers should look like, and Jack didn't fit the part. Short, thin—almost gaunt—and in his sixties, Jack always wore inexpensive-looking blue suits and a white shirt, sometimes with a handkerchief in the coat pocket, never dressed more casually, and appeared to be a conservative retired businessman. Something about him seemed rural, simple, newly arrived in the city. He was kind and friendly, apparently quite ordinary. In fact, there was nothing notable about him except for his clear, steel-gray eyes and a face that vaguely resembled Fred Astaire's.
Jack came to the lab to conduct some healing experiments a few times a month, and his healings were the most loving acts I had ever witnessed. Working in the sensory-deprivation chamber, he saw patients with illnesses ranging from cancer to heart attacks to broken bones, and he allowed some of us to observe. One day, a woman came in with a painful tumor in her stomach. She lay down on the thin leather bench in the chamber and closed her eyes, her head propped up on a small hospital pillow. Jack's hands took on a translucent quality as he waved them about six inches above her body. He was performing what he called “magnetic passes.” After a few sweeping passes up and down and across the entire span of her body, he placed his palms directly on her skin, resting them for a few minutes at various locations, starting at the heart. Then he moved to the top of her head, her throat, her abdomen, and finally the soles of her feet. Jack was matter-of-fact about the whole thing, even cracking jokes, but the tenderness with which he touched this woman made me think of a mother with her newborn infant.
Whenever Jack worked, his patients would become so relaxed I could barely see their chest walls moving up and down. They looked so peaceful, in fact, that I often wondered if they were still alive. Faces wracked with pain at the onset of the session would appear angelic as their suffering dissipated. Jack's healing sessions were contagious; I often felt better simply from being there, even when I hadn't felt bad to begin with. It was as though someone had tapped me on the head with an invisible wand, awakening me from a deep rejuvenating sleep.
One of Jack's patients was a young housewife, Claire, with debilitating lower back pain from an automobile accident. She had a medicine cabinet stocked with medications for pain, but they made her feel so listless and disconnected she couldn't function. And then, when the pills wore off, the pain always returned. Conventional doctors had pretty much given up on Claire, and she was getting beaten down. Jack was her last resort.
It was hard for me to be around Claire. Within minutes of seeing her, my lower back would develop a nagging, dull ache, which alternated with an annoying burning sensation. It disturbed me so much I'd fidget in my chair, unable to find a comfortable position. At first I wrote off my reaction to being “overly suggestible” and decided not to mention it to anyone. I didn't like complaining, and I didn't want anyone in the lab to think I was being difficult. So I dreaded the days when Claire would show up. Then, once while suffering through another of her healing sessions, I remembered I'd been through this kind of thing before.
Growing up, if I was around someone in pain, occasionally, within seconds, I would develop the same discomfort. Once in junior high, for instance, I was eating lunch with a friend on the lawn and suddenly started getting stomach cramps. When I mentioned this to my friend she said she wasn't feeling well either, having started the day with nausea and stomach pain. I saw nothing strange in this until, several minutes after she left, my symptoms disappeared completely. The times I told my mother about such incidents, she would be concerned that I wasn't feeling well, but neither of us ever made the connection that I might be picking up another person's pain.
That afternoon in the lab, I took a risk. I mentioned my reaction to Jack, and he didn't seem at all surprised. Quite the contrary. To my great relief, his eyes lit up and he winked at me. Always the perfect gentleman, he patiently took the time to explain that psychics often perceive many of the physical symptoms in the people around them. He called it a powerful form of empathy, which if unrecognized could be overwhelming. He said that the resistance and fear I associated with pain or unpleasant sensations was what caused them to persist. He suggested that whenever I picked up symptoms, instead of fighting them I could relax and let them flow right through me. It would involve some practice, but he was sure that I would get the hang of it.
I never saw Jack reverse cancer or perform any such miraculous cures, but his patients did improve. Naively, I had hoped he could relieve them of all their symptoms, but I soon discovered that healing didn't work that way. What Jack gave his patients was a second wind, a jump-start of powerful energy. With the added boost, they could continue their own healing processes. Jack was not a magician; he was an ordinary man with extraordinary abilities, which made him all the more credible to me. At a time when his patients were about to give up out of sheer desperation, he offered them hope. He handed them their power back and they took it, an interchange that ultimately inspires the most profound healing of all.
What I relished about Jack and other healers who came to the lab was that they talked about forbidden subjects such as death, a tremendously compelling topic for me. One afternoon when I was thirteen years old, coming our of a movie theater with a girlfriend, I suddenly realized that my time on earth was limited. For no apparent reason, I was faced with my own mortality; for the first time I realized that someday I would die. Since then, I have thought a great deal about death, though it has never been a morbid topic for me. Rather, this kind of contemplation has helped bring an immediacy to my life, a sense of impermanence that has kept its specifics in a clearer perspective. The healers didn't think it strange that I found graveyards to be peaceful places where I could sit, meditate, and connect with myself when I wanted to be alone. Most of the healers I met at the lab had a strong set of spiritual values underlying their practices, and we would often have conversations about an afterlife.
As a child, I always believed in an afterlife. This wasn't something that anyone taught me. I had just never thought to question it. To me, the spirit felt different from the body, stronger, more resilient. That it would ever die seemed impossible. Yet in Hebrew school and on the high holidays, the subject of an afterlife was rarely mentioned. The rabbi's sermons focused more on politics and ethics than on spiritual truths. In the Reform Jewish faith I was raised in, there were no psychic role models to train children. My experiences never seemed to fit into the mold. Now as a young adult, I found the lab a safe place to express my spiritual beliefs. I had finally found other people who thought as I did and understood.
A healer named Caroline told me a story that struck close to home. While undergoing heart-valve replacement surgery, a client's heart stopped beating and her EKG went flat. An emergency code was called and a team of doctors and nurses rushed in to resuscitate her. The client later reported having been aware of everything happening around her, but from a different vantage point. She said she had been transported to a tunnel, a long, cylindrical passage with no end, filled with golden light. Exhilarated, she began walking through the passageway, while the commotion in the operating room slipped farther and farther away. The intensity of the light kept drawing her forward with a movement so exquisite in its gentleness that she didn't think to resist. She felt complete tranquillity and had no interest in turning back. Then abruptly, in one swift motion, she was pulled out of this place and thrust back to the hospital again. Her life had been saved. The tunnel was gone.
According to her doctor, she had been hallucinating, the result of a shortage of oxygen to the brain. He also reassured her that there had been no irreparable damage. But this woman knew he was mistaken; her experience was too real to have been a hallucination. Caroline agreed. She had spoken to numerous people who were explicit in their descriptions of these near-death experiences. Many of them had described the same things.
When I heard about this, I was transfixed. The tunnel I had visited during the Tuna Canyon accident suddenly made sense. Although Jim had been open minded, the experience of the tunnel was novel for him, too. He had never been sure what it meant. I couldn't wait to tell Caroline my story. It matched her client's description so closely that I blurted out every detail. I felt as if I had just confessed a sin and been absolved. Caroline laughed and assured me that I hadn't done anything wrong. She went on to say that although there were small discrepancies in our perceptions, her client and I had basically visited the same place. She felt I had come closer to death than I'd imagined: The tunnel saved me; it had provided a perfect sanctuary.
I was astonished by the similarity of our experiences, and by the fact that others in life-threatening situations had been to the tunnel. I had always been fascinated by the bridge between life and death, the geography of the spirit moving between worlds. Now the tunnel also appeared to be a two-way passage: Even when physical life was over, in certain cases the spirit might return to the body.
I believed I had stumbled on a great secret: Having met death head on and survived, I had glimpsed what the other side looked and felt like. I now had a sense of myself as a pioneer, bearing testimony to the tangible link between life and death. Such validation of my personal experience brought me closer to my true voice, to self-respect, to the person I felt I was meant to be. And, finally, the discovery that I had gone through a near-death experience reinforced what I already suspected: Death was not an end but simply a transition into another form. A circle had been completed. I began to look at life with a broader viewpoint. I saw that human beings were blessed with gifts that I never dreamed possible. Psychic ability was only one of them. I no longer was willing to limit myself or to buy into other people's notions of my capabilities. The sky had no ceiling. It was boundless. And so was the spirit within us. It needed room to fly high and dive deep without restraint or restrictions.