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Child Sacrifice

The Child is father of the Man;

And I could wish my days to be

Bound each to each by natural piety.

—William Wordsworth, “Ode: Intimations of Immortality” from Recollections of Early Childhood (1807)

Shades of the Prison House…

We stood at the bottom of the hill, waiting in tense silence. My heart was pounding so fast and hard it felt like it might explode into a thousand pieces. The night sky hung over us like a thick black blanket. They stood on either side of us, holding flickering torches. I couldn't see their faces. The red-hot fire beneath the earthen ramp at the crest of the hill burned brightly intense heat radiating from the pit. Fear grabbed me and would not Jet go, its grip tightening like a vise. And tightened further still, until I began to choke.1

I awoke in a panic, screaming and crying. My parents must have rushed in from their bedroom, to see what was the matter. I remember them standing at the end of my crib, after I had calmed down, looking anxiously at me, making sure I was all right.

I was about three years old at the time.

This nightmare is one of my first memories. It recurred for perhaps another year or so—sometimes nightly. And each time it was exactly the same, like a repetitious film loop. I would wake up, heart pounding and bathed in the cold sweat of fear, at exactly the same point. I was just standing there, at the bottom of the ramp, waiting.

Waiting for what?

…Begin to Close

Probably because I never talked about the nightmare with anyone, I never tried to think this part through. I suspect my parents believed that my protests about going to bed were just ploys for extra attention. Or else that I was merely a reluctant sleeper, “going through a stage.” The truth was, I was indeed reluctant to sleep, but only because of the terrifying dream. I could not explain this to them. Nor did I understand it. I knew only that I was scared to death. Soon, I became afraid of the fear itself.

Then one day, for no apparent reason, the bad dream stopped coming. It was gone. And I forgot all about it. Until, that is, a couple of years ago when I had another unusual dream, followed by a series of coincidences.

I dreamt I was shopping in a busy indoor market in a foreign country, perhaps in Central or South America. There were vegetable and meat stands, and barkers in crowded stalls hawking jewelry and other trinkets. As I roamed through the market, a swarthy, somewhat sinister-looking stranger in a sombrero sidled up to me and whispered something in my ear in what I guessed was Spanish. Not knowing the language, the word made no sense. Yet the dream was vivid, and the whispered word felt like a message. (The market reminded me of a place I had visited many years before in Mexico City.)

A few days later, I was browsing the shelves of my late father-in-law's library when I happened upon a book on the Aztecs. I was casually thumbing through the book when I came to a passage describing a human sacrifice following a victorious battle:

A fire sacrifice was ordained—the most terrible and horrendous sacrifice that can be imagined. A great bonfire was made in a large brazier dug in the ground; this was called the divine hearth. Into this great mass of embers [the five hundred prisoners] were thrown alive. Before they expired, their hearts were torn out of their bodies and offered to the god.

I had been aware that the Aztecs performed such sacrifices. But reading this sent chills down my spine. All at once the flood of memories surrounding my recurring childhood nightmare returned, including the pain and confusion it had caused me. It had never before occurred to me to ask what it was that I had been so terrified of as I stood there waiting at the bottom of the hill. Now I knew, without a doubt: I was waiting to be thrown into that pit of fire. I had been afraid to die. I didn't want to be a sacrifice to feed some angry, vengeful god.

Was this nightmare a memory fragment of some actual, previous earthly existence?

Since I was familiar with the work of the respected parapsychologist Dr. Ian Stevenson, I certainly would not rule this out. For more than forty years, Dr. Stevenson, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Virginia, has been studying early childhood memories that are—to borrow the title of his classic book—at least suggestive of the possibility of reincarnation.2 Was my childhood dream just such a suggestion?

One of my favorite examples of past-life childhood memories comes from the late writer on science and the paranormal, Michael Talbot. In the introduction to his book Your Past Lives (1987), Talbot explained that he always believed in reincarnation because as far back as he could remember, he had memories of former existences, mostly in Asia. As a little boy, he stubbornly refused to call his parents “mother” and “father” until he was five years old, and then he gave in only because his parents were complaining that he was embarrassing them in front of their friends. He explained:

My refusal was not due to any absence of affection on my part. I did not have a mature intellectual understanding of what the tracts of strange memories inside my head meant, but I was vividly aware that I possessed a continuity, a history beyond the child's body in which I found myself. So it did not make sense to me to call the two kind people who were taking care of me my parents.…This was not the only precocity that my parents were forced to contend with. They rapidly discovered that they had a child on their hands who insisted upon drinking several cups of strong black tea every day, who preferred sitting cross-legged on the floor to sitting in chairs, and who was fanatically drawn to things Asian.3

In a telling afterword to the revised (1992) edition of his Mysticism and the New Physics (1981), Talbot noted that this “fanatical attraction to things Asian” went so far as to include a most unlikely spontaneous recitation of Buddhist aphorisms and prayers.⁴

Although my fire-pit dream did not lead me to speak in a foreign language or inspire other inexplicable behavior (as with Talbot), it nonetheless had the “feel” of a real event. Moreover, if the Aztec connection was valid, I could now see that the childhood nightmare fit in with a pattern of dreams that I'd been having over the past ten years. These dreams took place in geographical settings that appeared to be southwestern or western (where I've never visited in physical waking reality), and they all involved Native Americans.

For example, in one such dream I was a dark-skinned migrant farm worker, an American Indian. A bunch of us wearing tattered clothes piled out of an old rusted pickup truck at dawn. Our job was to work the field all day long, from sunup to sundown, digging trenches and turning the rich, dark earth. It was backbreaking work. Every muscle in my body ached. At dusk, as the bright orange sun set, I paused from my labors and leaned on my hoe. Standing silently and watching the sunset, I viewed Mother Nature's marvelous display in awe and reverence. My love for the land, and indeed for all creation, welled up inside me. For a blissful moment, I forgot I was an impoverished farm worker with barely more than the rags on my back to call my own. I felt like a king.

This “dream” had not felt like a dream at all. I could feel the dirt between my fingers and the persistent ache in my back. I sensed this man's passionate love for the earth as well as his connection to his illustrious ancestors, who had lived a far different (free and independent) existence on these same lands, on which he was now but a lowly serf. I was this man, yet paradoxically, I was also myself, observing.

In another dream, I am standing atop a high mesa or butte in the blazing hot sun. The air is so thin it is difficult to breathe. The soil is reddish-orange, the cloudless sky a pale blue. My two silent companions are dressed in costumes. Their arms are adorned with feather sleeves, their faces covered by eagle masks. I am wearing an identical costume and mask. In silence, the three of us make a circle, clasping arms at our shoulders. Suddenly, my awareness shifts. I am no longer focused on my companions. Instead, I am more aware of the sky and space around me.

With a thrill, I realize this is because I am floating several feet off the ground. As I levitate, I hear the screech of an eagle, which I assume is flying overhead. But even as I think this, I feel my mouth open and an inhuman cry escape from my throat. Shockingly, it is I who scream with the voice of an eagle. Then I feel myself floating slowly back down to the ground, my feet gently touching the earth. My happy companions surround me, offering hearty congratulations. Words of thanksgiving are exchanged. We stand huddled close together under the burning sun—the brotherhood of the eagle.

Before I had this dream, I had not read about any such ceremonies. I had been vaguely aware that many shamans have claimed to possess abilities to shape-shift, or to turn themselves into animals. I had never known what to make of this claim, except that it might be a valid report of a dream or inner vision.

In my dream, I was a hybrid, an eagle-human. I didn't fly, but I did levitate. This felt like a physical act, not a vision. I had the woozy sensation of floating several feet above the ground. Also, the sound that emanated from my voice box was not a human sound; it was definitely an animal sound. Although all this had taken place in a “mere” dream, it felt super-real. It was so vivid I never forgot it.

A few months after this dream, I picked up the book Black Elk Speaks, the story of the famous Lakota Sioux holy man Black Elk, as told to the Nebraskan poet John Neihardt. In one of the later chapters, Black Elk describes his experience doing the Ghost Dance, the ceremony that led to the massacre of the Sioux by the U.S. cavalry at Wounded Knee.

The Ghost Dance movement originated with a Paiute visionary messiah named Wovoka. Wovoka believed that if enough Indians performed the dance, the unspoiled world as they knew it prior to the arrival of the whites would be restored, and the dead (including the slaughtered buffalo and other animals) would be returned to life.

The first time Black Elk did the Ghost Dance, he said he felt himself “lifted clear off the ground.” The following day, during a second ceremony, he said he was dancing with his eyes closed when something peculiar happened:

Suddenly it seemed that I was swinging off the ground and not touching it any longer. The queer feeling came up from my legs and was in my heart now. It seemed I would glide forward like a swing, and then glide back again in longer and longer swoops.

As Black Elk describes it, what happened next sounds like an out-of-body experience. Tellingly, it is the eagle who inaugurates his ecstatic otherworldly journey:

I must have fallen down, but I felt as though I had fallen off a swing when it was going forward, and I was floating head first through the air. My arms were stretched out, and all I saw at first was a single eagle feather in front of me. Then the feather was a spotted eagle dancing on ahead of me with his wings fluttering, and he was making the shrill whistle that is his.5

I was astonished. Had I, as the young initiate in my eagle dream, also experienced an out-of-body episode? Could that explain the queasy sensation of physically rising above the Earth? Was this an actual memory of a shamanic ceremony?

In the wake of my discovery about the Aztecs and the revived memory of my early childhood nightmare, I began to consider in earnest whether all these dream experiences meant that I'd lived a previous life (or a series of lives) in the Americas. Like the late psychic Jane Roberts, I have long suspected that most of our traditional ideas of reincarnation are probably distortions of a far more complex reality.⁶ Still, I had to admit that this possibility intrigued me. It also raised many questions.

Perhaps I was intuitively tapping into certain memories of the human race (Jung's collective unconscious again). It could be, then, that the fire-pit nightmare of my early years was a memory fragment of some youthful, frightened soldier—a young boy, really—about to meet a horrible death as a sacrifice to a victorious enemy's terrible god.

So which was it: reincarnational memory or psychic perception? Or perhaps a clever psychological insight costumed in a dramatic form? What if it were all three?

Upon the Growing Boy

One problem that comes with trying to pin down an explanation for such experiences (and with exploring inner states in general) is that our mind has a tendency to slip into a simplistic “either/or” pattern. (I do this all the time, even though I know better.) Either something is a literal fact, or else it's a mere psychological symbol. But what if it's not “either/or”? What if it's “both/and”? Why can't we accept that some events (and probably all, if we but knew how to read them aright) straddle our rigid categories of fact versus fiction, and our conventional notions of reality versus fantasy? When I stopped trying to prove (if only to myself) that my fire-pit dream contained a true psychic perception of other times or places, I was able to ask what it might be saying to me if I read it as a story, that is, metaphorically That's when a whole new vista of meaning and understanding suddenly opened up.

Read in this way, as a literary metaphor, the dream made perfect sense. For the child in me—the self that knew and accepted the reality of magic, of the invisible bonds of nature—had indeed been sacrificed to an angry and vengeful god: the deity we call culture. In the West, this god goes by many names, including Lord Sci-Tech, Father Cap-Mat (for capitalistic materialism), and King Christ-Jehovah-Allah, just to mention a few of His (yes, I do mean to use the masculine pronoun) more familiar aliases. (The gods of the East have different names, but the effect of slavish devotion to them is much the same.)

The author of the book on the Aztecs, one Fray Diego Duran, looked down his nose in cold priestly condescension upon the savagery of the Aztecs. After all, hadn't the biblical tradition turned its back upon the brutality of Moloch (an ancient Caananite deity who demanded the sacrifice of the firstborn) way back when Jehovah spared faithful Abraham the sacrifice of his beloved son, Isaac? (Never mind that Abraham's willingness to do the god-awful deed is praised as a mark of his virtue and fidelity to God.)

The truth of the matter, however, may be far less flattering.

The poet William Wordsworth said that the child comes into this world “trailing clouds of glory.” This is usually dismissed as silly Romantic claptrap. Even a cultural critic as vociferous as Joseph Chilton Pearce, who has written movingly about “the magical child”7 and how our dysfunctional culture inhibits or destroys our psychic relationship to the invisible bonds, dismisses the notion of “a ‘natural religion' which would grow unfettered were it allowed.”⁸ For Pearce, it is essential to have a guru who has achieved “absolute unity”⁹ or perfect enlightenment as an external stimulus to and model of development for the child. The ashram is Pearce's answer, and nature requires us to surrender our personal power to the deus ex machina agency of the Hindu guru for her plan to work. (How could there be a state of “absolute” wholeness or “perfection” for a human being, except as a dangerously naive delusion? Also, where did this apostolic chain of perfect gurus have its ultimate origin? Is there not an infinite regress?)

But what if this is all wrong? What if guruism is just another symptom of the disease rather than its cure? Is nature so helpless after all? Could Wordsworth's “natural piety” turn out to be the gods' honest truth? What then?

These questions continued to nag at me. It seemed to me self-evident that in ways both large and small we are taught, from a very early age, to suppress and ignore the intuitive gifts that we bring with us—the visions of other times and places, the pull of the invisible bonds. What are we given in their place? The void is filled by the habit of acquisition. First we are taught to acquire knowledge from outside sources only (parents, books, teachers). Later come the endless television commercials promising the bliss of new toys, the trips to the mall, and our full induction into the consumerist order of getting and spending. Then, when we are old enough, we are instructed in the ways to acquire God's good grace by believing certain propositions or performing certain actions (or both).

In sum, instead of a literal physical sacrifice, like the one in my fire-pit dream, what our culture demands as a price of admission is a spiritual sacrifice. Culture, or what we call “civilization,” presents itself as the dispenser of all glory, the seat of all bliss, the guardian of all value, and the sole purveyor of all truth. As for nature, she's wild and dangerous, brutal and ignorant—and incompetent to boot. She can't even carry out her own plan without outside help. Whatever you do, don't trust her!

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that I could not separate my questions about inner things from my questions about outer things. The psychic can't be divorced from politics and philosophy; each has serious implications for the others. Self-criticism and cultural criticism are joined because the self is not an isolated entity. No one is an island.

In looking back at what I had been asked to sacrifice in order to feel a sense of belonging, I wondered whether this was indeed an inevitable course of events. Was it a tragicomedy of universal proportions, or was it merely the result of a wrong turn taken in our own Western journey? If the latter, how do we find our way out of the cul-de-sac in which we find ourselves? Where's a good road map when you need one?

To know how to get out, it helps to know how you got into trouble in the first place. You have to retrace your steps to find the first wrong turn. Or else it's hopeless.

Where had I gone wrong? I searched my memory for clues.

Earliest Intimations

What I got was not a memory, but something told to me so often as a child by my mother that it nearly qualifies as one.

When I was a toddler, dressed in the early morning to meet the day, I would ask if I could go outdoors to deliver my greetings. “Hello, birds! Hello, trees! Hello, sky!” I would proclaim in delight.

That, of course, was then—way back then, in the mists of memory. I don't recall how old I was when I stopped talking to the animals; when nature, previously a “thou,” became an “it.” What happened? When, and why, did I cease to regard the world—my world, that is—as a living world, populated by close friends or at least nodding acquaintances? At what point did I swallow the canard that this world is an inert ball of compacted dust, or a mere artifact created for use (if not abuse) by lordly humans? Or, was my “conversion” only halfhearted at best?

Ask the shadows on the wall. They know.

The Shadow Dancer

Around the time of my recurring fire-pit nightmare, when I was about four, a strange thing happened one night while I lay in bed, tossing and turning, trying very hard not to fall asleep. I did not want to find myself back on that ramp to hell.

After what felt like hours, I threw back the covers and got out of bed. I padded across the hardwood floor to the far side of the small bedroom, where I plopped down on the floor, just beneath the window. The atmosphere of the room felt different some how—charged. There was a “thickness” all about. It felt like being wrapped in a warm, comforting blanket on a cold, snowy night. Time itself seemed to slow down, like honey poured from a jar. I had no idea what made me decide to get out of bed at just that moment, or why I sat down beneath the window and stared at the wall. Yet I was expectant, as if waiting for something to occur.

Eventually, something did happen. A diminutive shadowy form, no more than six inches high, emerged from behind the oak desk. I could easily make out its shape even in the semi darkened room, a black silhouette against the knotty pine paneling.

It was a female form: a lithe, shapely woman in a short dress—a ballerina.

As I watched, spellbound, the ballerina danced. And danced.

I have no idea how long I watched her perform her graceful ballet. Eventually, I felt very sleepy, my eyelids too heavy to remain open. I padded across the room and climbed back into bed. I quickly fell asleep. And I had no nightmares that night.

What was it? Dream? Waking vision? Apparition? Spontaneous out-of-body episode? Encounter with a nonhuman entity (deva, fairy, sprite)?

Many years later, I would discover through my readings the existence of the astral dancing girls mentioned in a number of esoteric traditions, including the Tibetan Buddhist Dakinis (“sort of space fairies,” according to Joseph Campbell10), the Hindu Apsara, and the Islamic Houri. While the Apsara and Houri are depicted as little more than delectable cosmic call girls, the Dakini are portrayed in Buddhist mandalas (meditational art) as rather ferocious, frenzied, dervish-like dancing figures wielding sharp knives and drinking blood from skulls. “The inspiration for many of these images,” according to Joseph Campbell, “is Kali, the Hindu goddess of [death]. She has been taken over in the Buddha system by these Dakinis, the partners in this dance. Death is being celebrated…You are dancing in partnership with Lady Death, and you don't mind.”¹¹

Perhaps these images are not just symbols of the wrathful (or pleasurable) side of the female (i.e., Nature's) power but, rather, represent and record an actual psychic phenomenon, such as I had experienced. At four years of age, I was far too young to be preoccupied by thoughts of sex or death. Yet my ballerina was a “comfort girl” in the sense that her presence was soothing.

At the time of the experience, however, such mature speculations were obviously way beyond my ken. For years afterward, I thought about her now and then, even before I had the vocabulary to describe what had happened. It was something that I could never fully explain. Nor could I explain it away. Like a Zen koan, the shadow dancer remained a mysterious, tantalizing puzzle I could neither solve nor abandon.

I told no one, of course. Who would have believed a four-year-old anyway?

From time immemorial, the realm of shadows has been associated with the spirits of the dead, the Other World, the night side of nature, or, what Bob Monroe, the famous out-of-body journeyer, succinctly referred to as “There” (as opposed to “Here”).

I suspect that my shadow dancer was an emissary from There, and that her purpose was to reassure me that, in spite of my nightmares of fire-pits and human sacrifices, there is nothing to fear, after all. Certainly her immediate effect was calming, a psychological balm. For once, during that tumultuous period, I slept like a baby.

The long-term effect of seeing her was something else. Not reassuring, exactly, more like an inoculation. Philosophical materialism—the belief that only physical matter (regarded as blind, passive, and inert) is real—never crossed my mind. Nor was I ever tempted by the lure of any of the religions and their pat answers (including my own Jewish religion). Somehow I knew that the universe was a lot more interesting and mysterious, and that we don't have to accept any dues-paying creeds to access that mystery. It's free for the asking.

The ballerina made sure I would remember this—and more.

You see, I was born in 1957, the golden age of Father Knows Best and perhaps the high watermark of white male Protestant patriarchy. My preconscious awareness was formed in this atmosphere. This was the year of the Sputnik satellite and the beginning of the great phallic space race. The Red Scare was at its height. Eisenhower was president, Nixon vice president. George Wallace stood in the schoolhouse door. “In God We Trust” was added to our currency and “Under God” to our Pledge of Allegiance at the behest of good, God-fearing Christians (while Thomas Jefferson rolled over in his grave).

This was the bygone era of repression many longingly hope to restore—by persuasion if possible, by force if necessary. Of course, a main feature of this repression was the submission of the female and the (mostly unconscious) fear of her power—especially her spiritual power. Women were supposed to be barefoot and pregnant, and, like little children, best seen and not heard.

As author and musician Layne Redmond explains in her fascinating book When the Drummers Were Women: A Spiritual History of Rhythm, this attitude goes back, in part, to the early Christian church and the beginnings of its spiritual monopoly. 12

From time immemorial, notes Redmond, religious rites were celebrated with orgiastic singing and dancing. Women dancers and drummers often accompanied funeral processions, sometimes even as paid mourners. This little ritual originated in the ancient respect for the power of the shaman's drum, whose rhythm (the heartbeat of Mother Earth herself) produced the trance state that enabled the shaman to travel from Here to There, and to guide the souls of the dead to rebirth. Many shaman-drummers were women.

But then male-dominated Christianity came along and proclaimed exclusive rights to the soul and its proper care, both Here and There. Twice the Church banned female musicians and dancers, first in 300 C.E., and then again in 826 C.E.. As late (or recently) as the thirteenth century, the Church prohibited women who “dance in pagan fashion for their dead and go to the grave with drums, dancing the while,”¹³ from attending church services.

Away with the dancers!

Except that nature has this tricky little thing called balance. Whenever things get too much one way, the opposite condition tends to assert itself in order to rectify the imbalance. It's always darkest before the dawn. The Taoists speak of the circular play of Yin (female) and Yang (male), the ancient Greeks of enantiodromia (the transformation of things into their opposites). The Native Americans have their Medicine Wheel, or what some tribes call “the power of the hoop.”

Thus by 1961 (when I saw the shadow dancer), the wheel was already beginning to turn, culturally speaking, away from the stale, stiff patriarchy and toward new, more fluid and dynamic forms. To know this, one only had to be sensitive to the signs and portents.

So, call her what you will: Jungian anima, feminine consciousness, resurgent goddess, holistic right brain, night side of nature, or just plain Eve. She was to be my guide and guardian. Even when I (temporarily) denied or forgot her, she was there, waiting patiently in the wings to remind me of my quest—and my true self.

The Secret Source

I don't think that I ever consciously decided to keep the shadow dancer my secret. It never occurred to me to tell anyone about her. I'm not sure why. I suppose I thought no one would believe me. Or else that her visit was just too private and personal a thing to share. Yet, paradoxically, beyond the seeming strangeness of the episode, there was something normal and expectable about it. In a funny sort of way, I took it for granted that such things could happen. I assumed that there was more to life than meets the eye, a hidden side to things. And who thinks to mention the obvious?

There were other such experiences I had while growing up, including instances of telepathy or precognition (though I was not yet familiar with those terms). I often knew what others were thinking or feeling, and they didn't have to be right near me for this to work. Once, for example, I was watching a TV show called The Match Game. Suddenly, I knew the phrase that the emcee, Gene Rayburn, was going to ask the contestant to complete: ‘Tomato (blank),” I blurted out loud seconds before he asked. I realized even then that the odds of “guessing” the correct phrase (when it could have been virtually any word in the English language) must have been astronomical.

More often than not, however, this knowledge was not so specific. I just had certain inklings about people, their character and hidden motives. I was especially good at spotting phonies and deceivers. I can't recall any particular episode, but it happened fairly regularly.

When I was eight or nine, I had a peak experience. One summer my parents rented a modest cottage apartment at the New Jersey seashore, where we used to vacation. I absolutely loved the shore. To me, it was a sanctuary, a holy place. The ocean filled me with a sense of mystery and longing I could not even articulate.

We had just made the hour or so trek in my father's Pontiac, packed with boxes, suitcases, and our dog, a nervous toy fox terrier that barked during the entire trip. After we unloaded the car, my mother busied herself unpacking and cleaning. Probably to get us out of her hair, she sent my father and me off to the local variety store, just a few blocks away, to buy a few grocery items, like milk and bread. While Dad got the groceries, I picked out a new rubber ball and a package of strawberry licorice rolls. After paying for our purchases, we began the short stroll back to the apartment.

I walked on ahead of my father. It was a hot, sunny day in late June. The sky was a bright cloudless blue. I opened the brown paper bag to inspect my treasures. I was warmly greeted with the pungent scent of newly cast rubber and the flowery fragrance of the strawberry licorice. I was plunged into a vortex of scents, sounds, and sights, as if all my senses had been switched on high. The smells of the rubber ball and candy mixed with the scent of the creosote-stained telephone poles around me. Though the ocean lay a block to the east, the air reeked—nearly tasted—of salt and fish, seaweed and Sea-and-Ski suntan lotion. My springy flip-flop sandals slapped the soles of my feet with my every step on the blue-grey slate sidewalk in a comfortingly familiar rhythm. I was rapt with joy. The prospect of weeks of summer vacation stretched out before me.

But there was more. I had an awareness, a recognition. Everything around me was alive and conscious, conscious not only of itself but of me as well. This included everything that we usually think of as “mere inanimate objects,” including the wooden utility poles.14 The love I felt for this place was being beamed right back at me. It was as happy to have me there as I was to be there, as if shouting, “Welcome back! Glad to see you!” I was among friends.

This is the hardest part to describe. In the background hovered other, mysterious but welcoming invisible presences. It was like being on the inside of a one-way mirror, observed by eyes that I could not see. On the yonder side of the glass barrier lay something I could hardly imagine. This other reality, like the ocean, was vast and deep. When I stood on the beach, my vision was limited by the horizon. I sensed that this “other side” had no horizon. It gave me goose bumps to think about it.

In truth, none of these impressions were new to me. Together they made up what I might call the unacknowledged atmosphere in which all of my thoughts and perceptions navigated. Yet, in that one supercharged moment, those insights were crystallized in such a way that they could never be completely forgotten, no matter how far away from that physical (or indeed metaphysical) place I would subsequently wander.

I don't know how long this experience lasted. Maybe it was only a minute or so before I settled down from the peak of rapture into ordinary joy, like plunging into the trough of a wave whose foaming crest had just rolled by. At its height, however, I knew what I had experienced was true and valid. Of course, it would be many years before I would attempt to put it into words. At the time, I didn't feel the need to spell it all out. “Of course,” I would have said, if I'd bothered to say anything at all.

Odds and Ends

It was around this time that I discovered the term extrasensory perception (ESP), or what parapsychologists would rename psi. I devoured paperbacks by popular authors such as Susy Smith, Nand or Fodor, and Hans Holzer. All aspects of the paranormal absorbed my interest: telepathy, precognition, ghosts, poltergeists, UFOs—you name it.

Also, thanks to an aunt who was a chronic insomniac, I discovered late-night talk radio. Long before the advent of Art Bell and company, New York radio had Long John Nebel and Barry Farber, both of whom frequently featured guests like Ivan Sanderson, John Fuller, and other popular paranormalists. More than a few nights I stayed up until the wee hours, with the tinny transistor radio earphone plugged into my ear, fighting sleep, so I could listen to their fascinating conversations.

Oddly, I did not think of myself as an experiencer, only as someone interested in such things. I suppose this was a bit of cognitive dissonance, a necessary bit of self-deception (or self-defense). On an unconscious level, I must have been searching for confirmation, and maybe just for companionship. I did not think of myself as lonely, but I guess I was. I had no one to talk to about the things that mattered most to me, and nowhere else around me did I find anyone speaking about or acknowledging the kinds of experiences I'd had. There were no teachers, no mentors.

This sense of isolation did not change when I began my years of religious instruction. In Hebrew school, which met three or four times a week, I learned all about Jewish history and customs, the ceremonies for the holidays, and that kind of thing. We studied the Hebrew language and read the stories of the Bible (in English) and discussed their meaning. The subjects interested me, but only in a vaguely anthropological sort of way. None of the things I learned there had anything to do with my experiences of what I was calling the Secret Source. The god of the Bible was an interesting bit of history—nothing more.

My opinion was reinforced when I began, on my own, to read the New Testament and study Christianity. Jesus proved to be a fascinating figure, an angry prophet straight out of the Old Testament. I resonated with his demands for social justice. But Christianity gave me the same claustrophobic feeling as Judaism. The notion that the whole universe revolved around the Jews, or “the true Jews” (as the Christians thought of themselves), seemed to me, even then, to be too far-fetched, too parochial to be true. It seemed a neat bit of social engineering, a method of producing group solidarity—but no more. (Actually, the whole idea of a “chosen people” with a special relationship to the Source—whether merited by birth or belief—was morally repugnant to me.)

The biblical religions were too human-centered for my taste. They did not speak to my experiences, most of which had taken place in nature—by the seashore, in parks, my own backyard. A god apart from nature, let alone one against nature, made no sense to me. Moreover, all religions pretended to have all the answers, even when it was clear that they were just faking it (see chapter 3). To me, the universe was so vast and mysterious a place that all the simple explanations—whether religious or scientific—had to be false. I couldn't take them seriously.

The Secret Source thus remained a tantalizing secret, something just beyond my reach, certainly beyond my ken, yet it was something leading me forward in my quest.

Parallel Tracks

My inner life proceeded along two parallel tracks that never intersected. On the one hand lay my haphazard and piecemeal investigations into religion, myth, and what was then called “the occult,” stimulated by what I took to be intellectual curiosity. I read whatever interested me, poking around here and there. I loved science fiction and comic books of the superhero variety. On the other hand, I remained saddled with my socially inappropriate, culturally unorthodox sense of reality. It may seem unbelievable that I never put the two together, but that's the way it was.

I certainly didn't then (and still don't to this day) consider myself a mystic or a psychic. The term “psychic” especially tends to distort and obscure the phenomena it is meant to describe and illuminate. It comes from the ancient Greek word psyche, which originally meant “breath” or “soul,” those being interchangeable. So originally psyche was a bridge concept that spanned the physical and nonphysical realities, uniting instinct and intuition. But in the hands of Plato and some later esoteric philosophers, “soul” became something absolutely separate from, and even antagonistic to, the physical body and the earthly realm. Many of the nineteenth-century investigators of phenomena like telepathy, precognition, and ghosts called themselves “psychical researchers.” They were infected with a similar, if unstated, metaphysical bias, stemming from their Christian background.

When “scientific” parapsychology displaced the older discipline of psychical research in the early twentieth century and replaced the gathering of anecdotal evidence of exceptional experiences with laboratory experiments (see chapter 3), it also swapped the more technical-sounding psi (the twenty-third letter of the Greek alphabet) for the creaky-sounding psychic. This was more than a mere name change, however. At least Plato had assumed that everyone has (or is) a soul. Psychical researchers, because they studied the unique experiences of ordinary individuals in the course of everyday life, kept this assumption alive.

But when parapsychologists sought only repeatable events, they needed individuals who could perform repetitively and reliably under controlled conditions. Since relatively few could, or would, do this, it became a tacit operating assumption in parapsychology that, as Ingo Swann notes, psi was the product of specially gifted (or psychologically peculiar) individuals.¹⁵ In other words, the psychic “star” system was born. This idea then trickled down into popular consciousness, giving us “psychic celebrities” like John Edward. The psychic star system tends to foster the crippling belief that the rest of us must depend on (and ought to pay homage to) these “stars.”

Rather than “psychic,” then, I prefer the term “sensitive.” As Bear Heart notes, when someone would, for example, foresee the future, Native Americans would just say that they were “sensitive to the things around them, without some fancy label attached.”¹⁶ We are all more or less sensitive to our environment. If we weren't, we'd be dead! Most of us are more sensitive to some things and not others. I might be attuned to, say, the presence of oregano in a dish (at one time a mere whiff of it would give me a splitting headache). whereas you might know a day in advance that it's going to rain because your elbow hurts. Mostly it's just a matter of what we choose (or are conditioned) to pay attention to, or where and how we habitually focus our awareness. There are physical and nonphysical environments. But it's all the same sensitivity, just tuned to different stations.

Even some scientific researchers are starting to recognize this. Dr. William Roll, a veteran parapsychologist, is presently undertaking a study of the correlation of allergic and psychic sensitivity17 I don't know what will come of this particular study (when I last spoke with Dr. Roll, it was still ongoing), but I think it is a very fruitful area for inquiry.

I say this because as a child I had severe allergies. They were triggered by an event that took place when I was five or six years old. It was my birthday and my mother had surprised me by preparing my favorite dish: lobster. Then, a couple of days later, my aunt invited us over for a special dinner. The main dish was a big secret—yep, lobster! The next day, my body swelled into one giant, red-hot hive, from the folds of my eyelids down to the tips of my toes. My feet were so swollen I couldn't put on my shoes, let alone walk. My mother had to carry me into the doctor's office. I must have resembled the broiled lobsters I had eaten for dinner!

I have often wondered whether this episode had a symbolic component as well.

If, say, you look closely at the bottom of the Rider-Waite Tarot card “The Moon,” which belongs to the Major Arcana, you'll notice a lobster emerging from the tidal pool onto dry land. Obviously, the lobster is a creature of the watery depths—the unconscious, the unknown self, the soul, the Source Self, or whatever you wish to call it. When anything first emerges from these depths, it looks alien and strange to us. It may seem primitive or even repulsive, especially if we have been taught to fear what we can't understand. But, like the snake that sheds its skin and the moon that sheds its shadow, the lobster molts, renewing itself.

Thus, as the mythologist Joseph Campbell might say, the lobster—like the snake and the moon—is a symbol of the power of eternal life within the field of time to throw off death and to be reborn.18 As a water creature, it is directly controlled by the rhythms of the waxing and waning moon, itself symbolic of the feminine (intuitive, right-brain) knowledge. (In his commentary on the Tarot, A. E. Waite, the Victorian occultist and researcher, makes the lobster out to be some sort of diabolical figure; but Waite is just blowing smoke here.¹⁹) The lobster, as A. T. Mann suggests, is this deeper self.²⁰ That is, it represents our experience of our greater self as we initially encounter it.

So was my severe allergic reaction the result of my inability to deal with this powerful encounter? Did blocked sensitivity to information coming from the nonphysical dimensions lead to an increased (hyper-) sensitivity to certain aspects of my physical environment? The lobster episode may have dramatized this inner conflict in a symbolic way. Yet the lobster was not a mere personal symbol, after all; my physical illness was a medical fact. Nor is this an either/or proposition. We are used to thinking of “mind,” “body,” and “soul” as names of separate entities rather than as convenient labels we use to distinguish between aspects of a single, unified self. Thus we may overlook the delicate balance (ecology) that exists between what we regard as quite distinct psychic, emotional, and physical sensitivities (like allergies). Probably there is but one primary form of energetic sensitivity that seeks expression in all types of perception, both physical and nonphysical. When one of these pathways is obstructed or overused, the others are affected accordingly, becoming either underactive or overactive.

Because I was sensitive to the social atmosphere around me, I learned early on to obey the various cultural “No Trespassing” signs posted around and about. I picked up on all the cues, subtle and not so subtle. Which only ensured that the two tracks in my inner world would remain on parallel course, not touching or intersecting.

Alas, courageous I was not.

For instance, one day in Hebrew school, a girl in our class, whom I'll call Mandy, asked our teacher, a stocky, fiery-tempered woman, why Christians celebrate the Sabbath on Sunday rather than Saturday, as is the Jewish custom.

The teacher's face turned bright red and her already prodigiously bulging eyes almost seemed to pop out of her head, just like in the old cartoons.

“'I'm not here to teach you Christianity!” she bellowed, pounding her plump fist on the desk for added emphasis.

It is probable that the teacher was only covering her own embarrassing ignorance on this matter. Still, we all got the message, loud and clear. Or at least I did. Don't be too curious about other religions, other ways. Don't ask awkward questions.

So I kept my inquiries (and interests) to myself.

There were other, more subtle cues I picked up. Nothing blatant or traumatic, mind you. Just enough to tip my inner “no offense” meter into the red zone.

For example, like most children, when I was maybe four or five years old I had an “invisible friend” named Jerry. Jerry was a good companion and now and then offered friendly advice, though I can't for the life of me remember now what it was or what we talked about or did together. My mother knew of Jerry's existence. One day, while riding in the car, she asked me what he looked like. We happened to be passing a Mobil gas station and I pointed to the trademark symbol, which in those days was a horse with wings—the Greek Pegasus, who carried Zeus's thunderbolts and inspired poets. Except that, like Pegasus, my Jerry was white (rather than red, like the gas station sign).

For some reason, Mom became a bit concerned about my “invisible pals” (I think there was more than one). She consulted a family friend, a nurse with some training in child psychology. Her friend reassured her that I was a normal, if highly imaginative, little boy. Still, I think she was not entirely comforted. This was not her fault. It's just the way it was. Mom wanted me to be “normal” and not to suffer from social stigmas.

Anyway, shortly thereafter, Jerry took off into the sky one bright afternoon, never to return. And that was that. I pretended otherwise, but inwardly I was sad to see him go.

Communication is a subtle art. I was learning to keep certain things to myself.

Interlude: Mother Earth Remembers Me (Even When I Don't)

Many years later (thirty-five, give or take), I'm wading knee-deep in the water at the edge of the lake. On impulse, I thrust my arm into the water. My hand comes to rest around a particular smooth stone on the lake bed. Bringing it to the surface, I can see that it is a piece of white quartz. 1lring it over in the palm of my hand, I admire its odd, triangular shape. Then, blinking my eyes in astonishment, I really see it for the first time: The white stone is unmistakably shaped like the head of a horse in profile, mane and all.

The Lakota writer and teacher Ed McGaa (Eagle Man) calls this a wotai (or wotawae) stone.21 It is a special friend: a gift made by Mother Earth for just one person, perhaps tens or even hundreds of thousands of years ago. This is a humbling, yet also uplifting thought. The wotai stone connects us with the powers of the universe.

What had been lost so many years before was slowly, but surely, returning.

The Doppelgänger Effect

Don't get me wrong, my childhood was hardly that of a victim of persecution. What happened to me was nobody's fault—not even my own. There's a deeply ingrained cultural mythology at work here, much of it unconscious (see chapter 3). Barriers are erected and trespassers arrested. Well, in a bad situation, you learn to make the best of things. You do what you have to do to get by.

Jung says somewhere that if you don't trust yourself, then you have to expect a neurosis. Or, as Bear Heart warns, “If you let your logic ruin your first instinct, you may pay the consequences.”22 I was training myself to compartmentalize my thoughts and feelings/perceptions, so they would not mix. This leads to self-mistrust. Of course, when you practice keeping things from others, sooner or later you wind up fooling yourself, whether you intend to or not. I deceived myself into thinking that I was okay.

I did not then recognize the symptoms of metaphysical malnutrition. I was hungry for a kind of food that I could not even name. Therefore I began to overeat the foods I could name, especially junk food: candy, potato chips, cookies, soda. Technically, I wasn't obese (at least not yet, anyway). But soon I had to buy “husky boy” clothes, an embarrassing turn that only added to my painful feelings of social isolation and oddness.

One Sunday morning, I accompanied my father on his trip to the local corner store. While he got the Sunday papers, I perused the racks for my favorite comic books. The dingy place reeked of the tantalizing aromas of frying bacon and greasy French fries. Pots of hot, steaming coffee sat on their gleaming stainless-steel Bunn-0-Matics. I took my comics to the register and forked over my allowance money to the cashier.

As I waited for my change, my eyes were drawn to a bulky figure hunched over the lunch counter, greedily stuffing his face with a hamburger. Huge rolls of unsightly flab bulged out of his Ban-Lon knit shirt. Then, as if he'd felt my gaze, the fat boy turned his head in my direction and looked straight into my eyes. Our gazes locked.

Time seemed to stand still. I was no longer aware of the din around me. My jaw dropped open. His eyes widened, showing the incredulity I was feeling. The straight brown hair, the horn-rim glasses, the small mouth: It was me. Or rather, it was a larger version of me. It was like looking into a fun-house mirror. For an incredible instant, I wasn't sure if I was me looking at him or him looking at me. My consciousness flickered in and out like a candle in the breeze, as if I were dreaming while wide-awake.

The cashier handed me my change, and the spell was broken. I followed Dad out of the store, still in a kind of daze. Though I tried to put the incident out of my mind, it spooked me. From time to time, I would go on a diet and try to lose my excess baggage. Then I'd relapse into my old ways. My weight soared even higher. The scale groaned.

When I look at my sixth-grade class picture, I recognize the portly figure with the double chin kneeling in the front row: It's the hamburger boy from the luncheonette, down to the bulging knit shirt. I became him. At least for a while. Eventually, when I was about fourteen, I shed the pounds and kept them off. No special fad diets or pills. I just taught myself to eat healthily. Metaphysically, though, I remained hungry, if still ignorant of my malnourished condition. But I never forgot the hamburger boy incident.

What is a doppelgänger anyway? I first encountered this term in, of all places, a comic book. Even though I recall looking up the word in the dictionary, I failed to make the connection with my own strange encounter.

As was typical of me, back then.

That might not have been entirely my fault, however. The American Heritage Dictionary defines doppelgänger as “a ghostly double of a living person, especially one that haunts its fleshy counterpart.” But my hamburger boy was anything but a wispy bit of ectoplasm. He appeared as solid as the other patrons at the lunch counter, if anything only more ample in the flesh department. Haunting, yes—ghostly, no.

Actually, it turns out that this is more the rule than the exception. For example, shortly before launching their psychic adventures back in 1964, Jane Roberts, the future channeler of Seth, along with her artist husband, Rob Butts, ducked into a dingy barroom lounge in a seaside hotel located in York Beach, Maine, where they had gone for a much needed change of scenery. Inside the smoky bar they both observed a grumpy-looking older couple, a dour pair of sourpusses, sitting at a nearby table. The pair gave Jane the creeps as she realized that they resembled an older, sadder version of Rob and her.

Even though he was suffering from terrible back spasms at the time, Rob suddenly grabbed Jane's hand and led her, flabbergasted, onto the dance floor, where they twisted away to a Chubby Checker tune. When Jane looked around for the sour-puss couple, they were gone, as if they'd vanished into thin air. Rob wouldn't stop dancing.

A year or so later, Jane began speaking for Seth, her trance personality. Seth explained that the York Beach couple was a temporary physical materialization of the embittered people Jane and Rob might have become had they not embarked upon a more creative and satisfying part of their lives. Rob intuitively grasped that he was staring down the barrel of his own possible future self—his doppelgänger—when, ignoring his considerable pain, he shocked Jane by dragging her onto the dance floor. It was a symbolic break with the negativity and pessimism that had been dogging them both.

I was in my twenties when I read this account in Roberts's book The Seth Material.23 Despite the obvious similarities with my own encounter with the hamburger boy, even then I wasn't convinced that I'd seen my doppelgänger. After all, why would the mysterious powers of the universe give a hoot about something as trivial as my weight?

The rest of the pieces of the puzzle finally fell into place only a couple of years ago. That was when I met Gloria, a student in one of my philosophy classes. I guessed her to be in her early sixties, though it was hard to tell. She could have been much older. Slim, attractive, and neatly dressed, she gave a very youthful appearance. Her quiet reserve, however, could not mask a kind and gentle nature. Later in the term, Gloria felt comfortable enough to tell me of an unusual encounter she had had as an unhappy teenager:

My [encounter] came in the form of an enlightened conversation with a beautiful lady whom I had never seen before. She appeared before me out of nowhere. She had a wonderful smile, understanding eyes, and great listening ability. The color of her hair, eyes, and skin were of little significance. She was dressed meticulously in the latest fashion. The conversation started with her asking if there was anything troubling me. Being thirteen at the time and slightly overweight, my problem was being a little heavy. Up to that point, I loved and enjoyed eating, especially junk food, and although I did not like being chubby, I did not know how to help myself. I did not like being teased by some kids and was becoming sensitive and self-conscious. But I could not change my eating habits.

[The beautiful lady] listened attentively to my story and after smiling gave me this advice. First, realize all your good qualities inside and out, and that you are in control of your actions. Also, food is a friend, not to be abused or made to create problems. She also advised me to reeducate my way of eating through classes, to read books on nutrition, to develop new eating habits, to join an exercise group, and above all to love myself. She then kissed me on the forehead and disappeared into thin air.

I sat thinking for a while and all of a sudden a light went on in my head and I decided to take positive steps toward following her suggestions. I joined a weight control group which had a gym and diet program and from that day on I took control of my weight. I am still a firm believer in exercise and good eating habits. Through my enthusiasm I have encouraged several friends to join a gym and eat sensibly.

I often think of this “Mystery Lady” and wonder just how much she influenced me, and if eventually I would have gotten willpower or would have seen the light to take action on my own.

Gloria was far too modest to admit to the obvious resemblance between her adult self and her Mystery Lady. But when I heard her story, I sensed that it was her own (possible) future self that had come to counsel her with words of wisdom. Why and how does the universe arrange such things? Clearly, linear time is far from being the absolute one-way arrow our cultural common sense tells us it is. As to the why…

The answer to my question was now staring me in the face. My metaphysical double had appeared to me in order to administer a kind of shock therapy, a wake-up call to self-awareness. Like Jane and Rob's sourpuss couple and Gloria's Mystery Lady.

Yet, in a way, this only increased the mystery. If such things can occur on a regular basis, and if the vast powers of the universe are so intimately bound up with our lives—our strivings for greater awareness, self-control, and self-understanding—then why, most of the time, do we feel so cut off from this mystery dimension?

Having examined my own childhood, I began to suspect that I had to look beyond the events I could consciously recall and the surface influences that were obvious to me. I realized I had to explore the deeper, hidden causes of our metaphysical alienation. I had to confront what Joseph Campbell called “the myths we live by.”