The Pyramid Program for Gifted Children had only about seven kids in it by the time I was in second grade. One of them was a girl named Tara, a thin blonde with huge eyes whom I thought was very cute. Tara walked up to me in art class one day and told me a brown-haired girl we will call Laura wanted to ask me out on a date. I was carrying all my books at the time, and I lost control of my hands and dropped them all over the floor—but I didn’t even care. Eric and I saw Laura and Tara while we were riding our bikes in the neighborhood, and we all agreed to go to a roller-skating event at the school together. Although I said yes, I had never put on a pair of roller skates before, and certainly was not coordinated. At the skating party I was very nervous and spent almost the entire time hugging the stage so I wouldn’t fall over. Eric and Laura eventually came over and put my arms over their shoulders, so I could skate without falling down—and I had never felt better in my life.
Soon after the skating party, Laura refused to talk to me at all. If she was anywhere near me, she immediately walked away. Eric’s mother was a staunch fundamentalist Christian, and she worked in a textile store with Laura’s mother. They also went to church together. Eric confessed that he told his mother Laura was interested in me. I never found out what his mother had said, but Eric must have told his parents about our ESP experiments. I got very angry and asked him why in the world he would tell his mother that Laura liked me when he knew she was friends with Laura’s mom. All he did was laugh. He was clearly jealous and seemed to be happy that Laura wouldn’t talk to me anymore. He also did not want to do any more ESP experiments after this. We stayed friends, but things got really weird—and over the years he bullied me more and more. By sixth grade, he almost killed me by shoving snow in my face and cutting off my breathing—which he called a “white wash.” I couldn’t help but feel that my mother had been proven right about fundamentalist religions once again.
Dad came home one day with a huge machine that sat on top of the TV, called a VCR—or video cassette recorder—which allowed you to record television shows onto a big VHS tape. We were one of the very first families in the neighborhood to have one. Shortly after this, a new channel called MTV—Music Television—appeared. Dad was very excited about it and we watched it the first day it came on. The video that inspired me the most was “In the Air Tonight” by Phil Collins, as it had dreamlike images of a hallway filled with doors to nowhere, and a very intense and emotional ending where he was screaming, and the camera was very closeup on his face. When he sang, “I’ve been waiting for this moment for all my life,” I kept thinking about the awesome event the old man told me was going to happen on Earth in my lifetime—which I would eventually learn was called ascension.
Once I started third grade, there was a new kid in school named Billy, who was also interested in dinosaurs, space travel, and science. We became fast friends, and I was able to get my mother to drive me over to his house a few times a month. He had an Atari like I did, but his father worked as a manager at the Friendly’s restaurant, so he had extra income and bought him tons of different games. Billy had an entire two-foot-deep basket that was literally filled to the top with game cartridges—and for me this was like heaven. All we did was play games together—including classic titles like Yars’ Revenge, Haunted House, Pac-Man, and Adventure. I also noticed that his mom bought him all these boxes of sugar-heavy junk food that I was never allowed to have, including Twinkies, Ho-Hos and Ring Dings. I knew that a Twinkie would supposedly never go bad, even after a hundred years, but they sure tasted good—so I had one of them every time I went there.
I started having trouble in school during this same time. My third-grade teacher, Mrs. Smith, wanted us to write in cursive, and I hated it. I also did not want to memorize multiplication and division tables. I strongly believed that the answer would change depending upon where you were when you calculated it. The only way to be sure of the right answer was to redo it each time. So if I saw 9 × 3, I would count it out in my head while lifting up my fingers to make sure I had the right number. I would mentally count 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, see that I had nine fingers up, and then start again: 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27. This made me much slower than the other kids, and I began falling behind—but for months I felt it was very stupid, even dangerous, to try to memorize the answers. I seemed to remember that if you used math to travel and didn’t make a fresh calculation each time, you could get hopelessly lost, if not killed. It was many years before I read about higher dimensions and realized that there could indeed be places where the rules of mathematics functioned differently than they do here. If you are in a base-6 counting system, for example, you would count 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 21, 22, and so on. Certain areas might force you to use a different number base in order for the calculations to work properly.
I started reading as many books about science as I could—from school as well as in the children’s section of the Schenectady County Public Library. My mother would always have us “talk” to a tree when we went there. We would go up to the tree and say nice things to it, and the tree would “answer” by having the wind blow through its branches. It did seem that the tree always responded whenever we did this. The wind would pick up, even if it was calm, and I believed the tree was really talking to us. One day my mother told me about the work of Dr. Cleve Backster, who had a plant that “screamed” when he tried to burn it. She had read enough to be completely convinced this was true, and it had quite an effect on me. I had never considered the idea that plants had feelings before, but Mom was absolutely convinced that these experiments were real. Years later I would interview Backster myself, and I opened up The Source Field Investigations by summarizing his findings.
I quickly became obsessed with finding science experiments and trying them out at home. Mom also bought me a chemistry set, and my favorite ingredient was the phenolphthalein solution. You could pour some of this magic elixir into a test tube, drop certain chemicals into it, and get very nice crystals to form.
That same Christmas of 1981, my “major present” was a small color TV from the local Roy Matthews hardware store on Mohawk Avenue. It was wonderful, as now I could play Atari games alone in my room with the door closed and not bother anyone else. I continued to have wonderful dreams of flying during this time.
Sometime roughly at the beginning of 1982, I saw my first picture of the infamous “Face on Mars” in Odyssey magazine. This is a mountain on the surface of Mars that looks exactly like a human face—and the magazine said it was very strange. I immediately felt that someone had built it to look like this, and it was not just an illusion. I wanted so badly to know how it got there, and who did it. I felt the answer must be hiding in the UFO phenomenon. Perhaps there were people out there who were much older and more ancient than we were—people like the old man in my dreams. These same people may have built things like the pyramids, the stone heads of Easter Island, and Stonehenge here on Earth. I couldn’t understand why so many kids continued to hate me for bringing Odyssey to school, as I felt this was wonderful stuff that would change the world—just like the old man said.
That summer, the movie E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial was released on June 11. My father went to see it by himself shortly after the premiere, came home, and said we had to immediately go and check it out. We all went to see it either that same night or some time the next day. In the movie, a boy named Elliott started to take care of a kind-looking little extraterrestrial who had crash-landed on Earth. E.T. was able to levitate balls to show where he came from. He brought a dead chrysanthemum flower back to life, and he had a weird psychic connection to Elliott. When E.T. drank beer, Elliott started to get drunk—and when E.T. saw John Wayne kiss a girl in a movie, Elliott kissed a girl in his class.
I was stunned to see ESP in a movie, as well as telekinesis—E.T. was able to levitate the bicycles of Elliott and all his friends and make them fly through the air at the end. When E.T. died, I cried harder than I ever had in any other movie. I definitely realized that Steven Spielberg was comparing E.T. to Christ when E.T. was later resurrected. As a young adult, I bragged about the fact that I had cried fewer than ten times in my life for emotional reasons, and this was one of them. I identified so strongly with extraterrestrials that I felt like I was Elliott, and when E.T. died it seemed like I had lost the only real friend I ever had.
That same summer, in late June, Dad took us on our first vacation to Cape Cod, Massachusetts, where we stayed at a place called Captain’s Row. We went to visit Dad’s college buddy Bob at an oceanfront cabin he had right on the shore of Hyannis Bay, which was fantastic. However, the sand was loaded with razor clams, and I stepped on one of them by accident, causing my foot to bleed. Mom and Michael both decided to do “will walking,” and she told me that if I “set my intention,” I could walk without looking and never step on another clam. I got angry and said there was no way I was going to do that. She and Michael went off and did it anyway, waving their arms happily. Sure enough, neither of them looked where they were going and neither of them stepped on a razor clam. This caused me to resent them both for a while, but I got over it as soon as they stopped.
Mom was applying the wisdom she had read in the Seth books about the idea that “you create your own reality.” Others have called it “the law of attraction.” I certainly do not advocate putting yourself in dangerous situations like this. However, life is filled with unexpected dangers and distractions, and cultivating a positive attitude can significantly affect your experiences. The phenomenon of synchronicity taught me that when I focused on the positive, amazing and inexplicable things could happen. Similarly, when I knowingly hurt others or hurt myself, I would invariably attract “bad karma,” in which negative events would manifest in my life with shocking precision and timing. By the time I was in high school, I was already convinced that karma was absolutely real—and extremely important to be aware of.
In the fall of 1982, I became one of the “big kids,” and got to stay on the upper floor of the elementary school in Mrs. Austin’s fourth-grade classroom. By this point, Dan Rather was warning us almost every night that we could all die in a nuclear war. More and more often, I heard my parents yell at each other after they put Michael and me to bed. We were upset enough by this that I got rid of my huge hardwood double bed and moved into Michael’s room, with a new set of bunk beds that the bass player in Mom’s band built for us. We turned my former bedroom into the family room, and it was hardly ever used. My grades continued dropping in school, and the bullying kept getting worse and worse. One kid named Chris came up with a line that I ended up hearing again and again: “He’s so smart that he’s dumb.” Everyone thought this was hilarious.
During this time, my father got me backstage to meet Thomas Dolby, who was riding high on his hit single “She Blinded Me with Science.” I really enjoyed meeting him, and I could tell he was totally overwhelmed with everything that was happening. He was polite, but very exhausted and distracted. This was extremely common for the musicians that Dad would take me backstage to meet. I had no idea at the time that I would spend much of my adult life going through similar challenges as a public figure—even though the old man had repeatedly warned me about it in dreams.
That Christmas, Michael and I were thrilled when Dad gave us an entire magazine he had drawn by hand. The front cover had a picture of Mickey and Minnie Mouse, and a title that said, “Guess where we’re going?” Once we opened the book, we learned we were going to Disney World in February. He had drawn images of Disney characters, and there was colorful text that talked us through it step by step—as well as a pouch with a thick color brochure for Disney World in it at the back. He also gave us each a jigsaw puzzle from GE that featured a magnificent flying city, complete with UFO-type craft flying through it. At the top of the puzzle, it said, “IF WE CAN DREAM IT, WE CAN DO IT.” I built the puzzle on the kitchen table and felt it was absolutely true. It was only a matter of time before we had cities and spaceships just like the ones I was already seeing in my dreams.
We headed off to Disney World in early February and were lucky enough to be able to skip school while we were gone. Both Mom and Dad got a terrible virus that gave them diarrhea and they were very sick. Mom spent almost the entire time flat on her back in our suite, and Dad took us on all the rides while drinking out of a bottle of Kaopectate that he had wrapped in a brown paper bag. Dad was there for a working trip, since General Electric sponsored a ride in Epcot Center—and we got to go behind the scenes into rooms that only the upper-level management would normally see.
Dad had hoped the Disney World trip would improve his relationship with my mother, but things only got worse and worse. Mom started leaving the house every night for rehearsal with her band Hybrid Sedan after dinner, leaving Dad to entertain us and put us to bed by himself. Mom didn’t come home until after he had to go to sleep for work the next morning. Dad started telling us stories every night. He would ask us for an idea or a topic, and then create a story out of it that always involved two little boys—and we really enjoyed that.
On November 20, 1983, a television movie called The Day After was aired. It was heavily advertised and everybody knew about it. The ads showed horrific scenes of a post-nuclear apocalypse and the people who survived. My parents refused to let Michael and me watch it, but I wanted to know what the media was showing everyone, so Michael and I sneaked into the family room and watched it while Mom and Dad were seeing it downstairs. The images were absolutely terrifying, and after just a few minutes, we’d had enough. I knew that if something like this ever happened, it would quickly destroy all life on Earth. Yet, night after night the TV news made it sound like this could happen at any time—and we might not even realize the missiles had launched before we were already dead.
I didn’t understand how anyone could think this was a good idea. If you have a war where the Earth itself is destroyed, there is no winner. Everybody loses. And why would the US and the Soviets want to do this if they were also going to die from it? This faceless terror caused everyone to feel incredible stress, fear, and pain, which tended to make them hurt one another. I found out only years later that a vast system of underground bases had been built for our “leaders” to survive a nuclear war, while everyone else died out on the surface. These cities were connected by an underground train system with egg-shaped cars called “sub-shuttles.” This would allow them to travel anywhere they wanted and support many hundreds of thousands of people whom they chose to survive.
Apple released a wonderful-looking new computer, the Apple IIc, in late April 1984, and my neighbor Brett got it right away. He showed it to me and it was incredible. The IIc could run all the games that we had at school, as well as all the games my friend Eric had on his own Apple IIc at home. I talked at great length about how awesome this computer was, but I never imagined Dad would actually buy one for me just over a month later. Michael also got to buy something big that he really liked, and in his case he got a high-end stunt-riding bicycle called a PK Ripper.
On the day we went to buy the computer, I was sitting in a restaurant and a very large ball of earwax rolled out of my ear. It felt oddly symbolic, as if I were somehow being told that I would have better ESP—I would “hear” better—once I started using the computer. I ended up using the same computer until 1995, when I first got on the Internet after I finished college. I came home with the whole system in a big box, and also got a particleboard computer desk to hold it. I put the desk together by myself, but did not cover up the screws with the little round stickers that looked like wood grain. I wanted to be able to tighten them again if the desk ever started getting wobbly. Just a few weeks later, those stickers ended up saving me from the worst trouble I would have ever gotten into in my life.
Soon after getting the new computer, Michael and I were watching a show called Mr. Wizard’s World on Nickelodeon and got very excited. Mr. Wizard held up a bottle of white powder, and said, “What I have here is some KNO3 . . . and we are going to use it to burn sugar.” YES! My Pyramid teacher, Professor Schottman, had given me a box full of mysterious chemicals from his attic to help me do more experiments—and it included a bottle of KNO3. Mr. Wizard mixed KNO3 and sugar together in a little aluminum pie pan, and had a kid light it on fire with a match on the end of a four-foot-long pole while they were wearing goggles. The mixture fizzed and burned a little bit, creating a small fire and some black goo—and that was it. “We’ve got to try this right now,” I told Michael. We ran into the basement, grabbed the KNO3, and got one of Mom’s aluminum pie pans out of the kitchen cabinets. Since Mr. Wizard did it all indoors, I thought it would be perfectly fine for us to set it up on the kitchen table. We grabbed all of Dad’s old newspapers out of the garage and created a three-inch-tall stack for the kitchen table. “How much KNO3 do you think we should use?” “I don’t know, maybe fifty-fifty,” Michael replied.
We mixed together enough KNO3 and sugar to create a thick layer of powder that covered the entire bottom of the pie pan, and put it on top of the stack of newspapers. I tried to light it four different times with matches but it didn’t work. Finally I realized we needed more heat. The match would be a lot hotter when it first started, since that’s when the magnesium would be burning, so I lit one and tossed it in immediately. All a sudden, the KNO3—potassium nitrate, the active ingredient in gunpowder and dynamite—roared to life. Within about three seconds, we had a gigantic three-foot-tall, one-foot-wide cylinder of blue fire that was swirling in an angry rage, looking like some DNA molecule from hell. We could immediately feel the heat blast on our faces, like the flash-pots at a rock concert. The flames were licking against the glass globe light that dangled over the kitchen table, leaving soot marks. Michael and I were screaming and crying at the power and the fury we had unleashed, right in the spot where so many tense dinners had taken place in the last few years. We had no idea if we were about to burn the whole house down and could only watch in absolute disbelief. The tower of fire blasted on for about two minutes nonstop and finally died out. Nothing else had caught on fire, thank goodness.
I grabbed the entire stack of newspapers, which still had some small flames, and ran out the side door with them. The oxygen-starved flames suddenly surged over my right shoulder, but did not burn me. I stomped them out on the driveway. The house was filled with a very thick gray smoke that smelled like rotten eggs that had burned. Some of the black, molten goo had eaten through all the newspapers, and it had carved a mark in a quarter-inch-wide area of the tabletop, right next to the salt shaker. As if by some synchronistic miracle, my wood stickers were the same color as the table. I put one of them over the hole, and it fit perfectly. Every night after that, we were afraid that Dad would see it—but he never did. Our babysitter, Ellen, came by and we opened up all the doors and windows, using fans to blow all the hideous smoke out. By the time Mom came home, the smoke was gone, and Michael and I were wailing and begging for forgiveness on our knees. “I think you have already suffered enough,” she said. We all agreed not to tell Dad.
A few weeks later, Mom sat Michael and me down in the living room and said she had something important to tell us. Michael was immediately scared, and I already knew what she was going to say. “Your father and I are going to get separated,” she said. “He is going to start living somewhere else from now on.” Michael started crying really hard. I almost wanted to say, “What took you so long?” but I kept quiet. Less than a month later, we went off on another two-week vacation to Cape Cod. Mom took us out there the first week while Dad moved all his stuff out of the house with his friends. Then Dad came out for vacation on the second week while Mom cleaned up and rearranged the house by herself.
Although the vacation was great, and I felt closer than ever to my dad’s friend Bob’s family, going home was a big shock. Dad had kept rows and rows of records in the living room, both on the floor and on three wooden racks held up with cinder blocks. There was also a huge stereo system on the racks that sounded amazing. Dad had an estimated fifteen thousand records on shelves in the basement—a huge treasure room of rock. Everything was gone. The living room looked completely barren and dead, and there were black scuffmarks on the wall. Then I went up into the family room and realized the color TV I had gotten for Christmas was gone. The Atari was sitting there disconnected and defeated. I asked my mother what had happened, and she was very upset. “Your father was going to take one of the two TVs, so I told him he could take the little one but not the big one.” I was very angry at her, and at Dad, for making this deal behind my back, without even asking me. She apologized and said so many bad things were happening that she just wanted to get it over with, and I should be glad that we still had the big TV. I felt crushed, because that TV had been given to me for Christmas—and I still used it.
I started eating lots of Oreo cookies, which my mother always kept in a big galvanized-steel-lined drawer by the kitchen door, to self-medicate from the pain this was causing me. I got very good at opening the drawer so quietly that she couldn’t hear it—even when she was seven feet away in the next room, teaching one of her piano students. With my new stealth technique, I felt that I could get away with eating as many cookies as I wanted. This caused me to gain weight very rapidly—just like Billy’s brother had after their mother died of cancer. I became extremely depressed, moved back into the “family room,” and stopped taking showers. My mother tried to make a joke out of it at first by rapping, “You smell funky,” in the same way Run-DMC said, “You be illin’.” I still refused to listen, and it only got worse and worse until she eventually demanded that I start cleaning myself up. Even then, I would go days at a time without a shower—and this didn’t stop until I went back to school to start sixth grade. At this time, Mom told us that there was going to be far less money now that Dad was gone, and we would have to spend much less in order to survive. Everything was different now, and we needed to be very careful.
This was when my first “core trauma” occurred. All of us have had events like this in our lives, where our childlike wonder and fascination with life collides with harsh reality. It is a similar but more powerful version of the first time a baby hears the word “no.” These events program our subconscious mind to re-create the same traumas through “repetition compulsion.” I was already addicted to video games, and we never had enough money to replace my TV. Therefore, lack of money, giving my valuables away, a feeling of being betrayed by others, and the desire to indulge in addictions, such as “comfort eating,” became cycles that kept repeating in my life.
Mom became an extreme workaholic, never slowing down, and made all her money from teaching piano and voice students and playing music gigs. She took on a lot more students, and that meant I couldn’t stay downstairs at all, three days a week, after I came home from school—and there was now no TV upstairs. My room felt like a prison. She also had hated all the piles of magazines, newspapers, and letters that Dad had kept around the house. All these new rules were created. Everything had to be superclean—to the point of being like a museum. Michael and I now had to do almost all the housework and yard work ourselves—and if we left a mess anywhere, we got yelled at.
My life turned into a nightmare. We had to eat the same food four or five nights a week, reheating it each time—and it was usually homemade macaroni and cheese. We hardly ever went to a restaurant. The whole house was now loaded with booby traps—rules about keeping things clean that would create instant punishment if they were broken—and no matter how careful we were, both of us got in trouble every day. If Mom found one water stain on the bathroom sink, or one tiny crumb of bread on the kitchen countertop, we were severely disciplined—and she felt she had every right to be angry. I stopped washing my hands when I went to the bathroom because it was nearly impossible to avoid leaving a water stain. I realized that most people were not like this, but since this was what she demanded, we had to follow her orders. We already knew she was far too tough to fight against, as that would only make it much worse. My home life soon became a daily struggle of trying to figure out how not to get in trouble and failing constantly.
Due to repetition compulsion, I would end up spending most of my life subconsciously attracting people who were highly dominant, and I would be too terrified to confront them. Identifying and recovering from these traumas eventually gave me the strength to stand up to the grand villains in our planetary script, despite the dangers involved.
Mom took us to Rudnick’s, a clothing store on State Street in downtown Schenectady, to buy new pants for school. It was dark, cold, and smelled strongly of leather. The Olender furniture store next door to it had a “Final Going Out of Business Sale” every year or two. Now that we had very little money, I could pick out only one pair of blue jeans. The lady working there was very cruel to me, as if that would somehow inspire me to lose weight. She took one look at me and said, “You’re going to need husky pants.” Somehow, companies like Lee and Levi’s had decided that it was cool to compare fat kids to thick-looking Alaskan dogs, but I hated the term. I also needed the legs to be shortened, which caused us to have to wait even longer—and the whole thing was a horrible ordeal.
On the first day of school, the huge ex-Marine Mr. Korthas saw me, with his whole fifth-grade class behind him, and bellowed out, “You look like you have eaten well.” All the kids started laughing hysterically, and I was crushed. I was one of the only kids in school who was overweight, and now the bullies finally had a weapon they could use against me. I was called “lard ass,” “butter ball,” “fatty,” “fat shit,” and many other such names on a regular basis. Another kid in my sixth-grade class named Joey started putting me into painful joint locks almost every day. He would grin widely through his crooked teeth and laugh as I begged him to stop—but he was much stronger than I was. I also made a new friend that year, a kid named Shane who had just moved into town. At the time, no one liked him since he was from a poor family and smelled sometimes. People called him names like “dirtbag,” but we got along very well.
Not long after school started, I was sitting at my computer desk one night and accidentally soiled myself. Nothing like this had ever happened to me before. I grabbed a pair of black sweatpants—the only other pair of pants I owned that still fit—and hobbled into the shower. The pants were in such bad shape that I didn’t even want to try to save them, and I also did not want to tell my mother about it. I went downstairs, got a plastic garbage bag, and deposited both my pants and underpants into it as if they were radioactive waste. I tied the bag tightly and threw it out in the garage. I walked right past my mother as I did this, and she had no idea what was going on.
I was too embarrassed to tell her what had happened, and was terrified that I would be in trouble for destroying expensive clothing, so I started wearing my black sweatpants to school every day. Since I had to do my own laundry, I didn’t understand that black clothes needed to be washed in cold water, and the sweatpants very quickly faded into a dull brown. This almost immediately caused the bullying to get much worse. Every day I was violently insulted for my weight and was told I needed to get new pants. Joey would put me in a headlock right in the classroom and ram my face into his soaking armpit, which smelled like onions and dog mess, and no one cared. This went on for weeks and weeks, and my mother never noticed what I was wearing. The torture I went through at school during this time was almost unimaginable. I finally broke down crying one night and told her what had happened. She was very understanding and forgiving, and immediately took me back to Rudnick’s so I could pick up another pair of huskies. I also ended up getting a useless pair of “parachute pants” that made a swishing noise as I walked, simply because that’s what the cool people were wearing—for less than a year.
Mom had a Polaroid instant camera and took a picture of me when I had a computer exhibit at the science fair. I was demonstrating an old computer program I had learned to write in Pyramid. It would draw a straight line and rotate it in circles like a radar screen, with the center of the monitor as the pivot point. Intricate, curving geometric designs would form in the images it left behind—which I learned were called moiré patterns. I had discovered this quite by accident, and no one could really explain why the patterns were so elaborate and beautiful. Everyone was impressed with my exhibit, but when I looked at the photo I saw the truth. I had gotten really fat. Somehow I didn’t see it when I looked at myself in the mirror. I would only look at my face and had become very disconnected from my body—but the photograph did not lie. I felt terrible—but it only made me eat even more.
In May, Twisted Sister released the rock anthem “We’re Not Gonna Take It,” which was constantly replayed on MTV almost immediately. The whole thing was written for kids who were rebelling against abusive parents and teachers, and my brother and I loved it. We jumped at the chance to see them live in concert later that year, after their second single “I Wanna Rock” was doing just as well—and this was the first time I was truly awed by a famous band I got to meet backstage with my father. They were clearly drinking a lot, but they were all in a good mood and doing very funny things. They were nice to us, and since we were the only kids there, we got special treatment. The whole trick was not to act like they were famous. If you treated them like rock stars, they would cut you off in less than thirty seconds. If you acted like they were ordinary people, you might get to chat with them for an hour. This was remarkably consistent for every famous person I met.
When we see people repeatedly in the media, we feel like they are a part of our family. Our limbic, reptilian brain cannot differentiate between the images in a photograph or film and actual reality. These people become part of our tribe—and we feel an ongoing pain of abandonment when no actual in-person contact takes place. Meeting a public figure can be an awesome, almost mystical experience, flooding us with an incredible surge of natural opiates in the brain. We become so high that we do not realize how our breathless hyper-enthusiasm is making the other person feel. Some public figures appreciate this type of attention at first, but before long they become traumatized by people who refuse to stop talking or give them any privacy. The most important secret to remember is that they are ordinary people having an extraordinary experience. My early training in losing the “hero worship” impulse paved the way for me to have direct telepathic contact with extraterrestrials later in life. The druglike high of feeling you have been “chosen” and are “special” can make it impossible to achieve any type of reliable communication. Extraterrestrials and spiritual beings are ultimately just people who are living their own lives and doing their best to help us out—at least when they are on the positive side. Negative beings feed on the energy of being worshipped and get a genuine rush from creating fear, terror, and pain.