The Art of Intuition

I USED TO LAUGH at psychics and palmists, tarot and tea-leaf readers. I looked down on the charlatan with her neon sign (“Miss Sophie’s Psychic Readings: $5.00”). Fraud! Superstition! Smoke and mirrors. Nonetheless I remember once visiting a seer with my sister on a lark. We were only young girls. We came into her Gypsy tabernacle, bemused by the multipatterned curtains swaying from the ceiling and walls, and the little, round, cloth-covered table boasting its crystal ball. It had all the trappings of a movie set.

She told me I’d marry a man named David, a prediction I laughed off, since at the time I knew twelve men with that name. (The fact that I later married a David did, however, screw her prediction into my brain.) Afterward, my sister and I, buckling with laughter, fell back out onto the street. How had she done it? Did she have mirrors? Had she overheard us talking before she joined us in her inner sanctum?

Another time I had my palm read at a New Jersey County Fair together with my best friend, Corinne. Corinne had slipped off her engagement ring to fool the palmist, for though we were willing to plunk down our money, we certainly didn’t “believe” in this stuff; we were young girls having fun. Again, the psychic was decked out in turban and Gypsy robes. She told my friend that she would not marry for three years, and this time, too, we left her tent bursting with laughter, because her wedding was scheduled in only a few months. As it happened, Corinne broke the engagement and didn’t marry for several more years.

Fast-forward several decades. I was in the middle of a divorce, separated from my husband and children, confused, and groping. A friend urged me to see the Reverend F. Reed Brown, a psychic, at the Arlington Metaphysical Chapel in the Virginia suburbs. I was unhappy enough to agree. Later, I became friends with Reed and even took some classes with him, but at the time I was simply knocked off my pins by his insight. I assumed it was somehow a fix.

The Arlington Metaphysical Chapel is a pretty little white clapboard building with lovely stained-glass windows. It has that special musty scent of hymnals and flowers, a place of quiet prayer. Reed’s office was a small room off the entranceway. He was reading for someone else when I arrived, for that was what he did: see people, hour after hour. I prayed in the church until I was called into his tiny cluttered office.

On arrival, I’d been instructed to write down the names of three people who had passed over and all my questions on the same three-by-five-inch card, fold the card in half, and then in half again, until it made a tiny wad. Brown stood up behind his desk as I entered. He was a roly-poly man in his middle age, with a cheerful smile and an open, cordial hand. A man delighted to live in his own skin. On the wall behind him hung a portrait of a white-bearded man. I learned later that it was Dr. Peebles, his special familiar, or spirit guide.

Reed slapped a tape into his tape recorder for me. He took my card and asked me to cover his hand with mine, said a prayer for guidance, then dropped the card (I picked it up), sat back, and proceeded to tell me the three names on the card and to answer all my questions.

I was stunned. How had he done that? Were there cameras in the entrance hall? Even so, no camera could have read the card; my handwriting is smaller than the footprints of fairies. I can hardly read it myself! One especially interesting moment struck me. One of my questions concerned a friend of mine named Page. Reed leaned back in his chair, one hand to his forehead. He tapped the third eye. “I’m seeing a book, a beautiful book, and pages are turning. They are fine pages, covered with writing, and they are turning one by one. One by one. Does this mean anything to you?”

It was only as I was driving home that I remembered I’d asked about my friend Page! Dope! I’d totally forgotten my question by the middle of the reading. (For one thing, I was still puzzling out how in the world he had managed to tell me the first names of my mother and father, who, he said, were watching over me proudly from the Other Side.)

I found the reading interesting but did not go back for years. One day my friend Ted Greene, the Harvard anthropologist who was working then with the State Department, asked if I wanted to go with him while he consulted Anne Gehman, a well-known medium in Virginia. (This is the same Ted who years later told me about seeing the spirit of his friend Wayne after his death.)

We went to a well-kept suburban office similar to a doctor’s office. Anne was a pleasant woman a little younger than me, and I was surprised at how down-to-earth and ordinary she appeared, and how much I liked her. (It was the same with Brown: how professional and high-spirited and how ordinary he was—and how anything but.) While she gave Ted his reading, I waited in the comfortable, well-appointed anteroom and leafed through the magazines in the basket, none of which were on psychic matters, feeling a little envious that I wasn’t getting a reading, too.

As we drove away, Ted told me what she said. I was impressed. This medium was quite different from the psychic of my imagination who bends over your palm while intoning, “You are very sensitive, you’ve been unhappy, no one understands you,” and charges fifty dollars for words that could apply to anyone.

But I was still far from the realization that we all have these abilities or that they can be developed. I didn’t know that the more you love, the more psychic and intuitive you become. I didn’t know that, made fearless by the ardor of your love, you dare to trust the Universe—angels, spirits, and guardians, your own insights and inspiration—to work with you and bring you . . . everything. Including information. Inspiration. I didn’t know that joy and gratitude are somehow involved, as well as humble surrender to something bigger than yourself.

Years later, Anne became a friend of mine, and together with the mediums, she taught me how to give a reading. Anne is also the pastor of a Spiritualist church in another nearby Virginia suburb, Falls Church (and here it doesn’t seem out of line to note that Washington, D.C., a political power center, is apparently a spiritual power base as well, boasting no fewer than seven Spiritualist churches that I know of, in addition to the thousands of other temples, mosques, synagogues, and churches of every denomination).

The Nine Spiritualist Principles

The National Spiritualist Association of Churches was formed in 1893 and promulgated the first six principles in 1899. They have revised them four times, the last in 1998:

1. We believe in Infinite Intelligence.

2. We believe that the phenomena of Nature, both physical and spiritual, are the expression of Infinite Intelligence.

3. We affirm that a correct understanding of such expression and living in accordance therewith constitute true religion.

4. We affirm that the existence and personal identity of the individual continue after the change called death.

5. We affirm that communication with the so-called dead is a fact, scientifically proven by the phenomena of Spiritualism.

6. We believe that the highest morality is contained in the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

7. We affirm the moral responsibility of individuals, and that we make our own happiness or unhappiness as we obey or disobey nature’s physical and spiritual laws.

8. We affirm that the doorway to forgiveness is never closed against any soul here or hereafter.

9. We affirm that the precepts of Prophecy and Healing are Divine attributes proven through mediumship.

IT WAS A THIRD psychic and medium who introduced me to the history of spiritualism. So innocent was I that I’d never heard of the word, much less of the movement that had grown up in the late 1800s, in the wake of the intense interest in spirits and parapsychology that flourished in that century.

I’m not sure why the spirit world pronounced itself so prominently in the nineteenth century. Until then only Joan of Arc and maybe Emanuel Swedenborg admitted to hearing voices, communing with spirits. Even Saint Teresa of Ávila was circumspect. It may have had to do with witch-hunting and the Inquisition, but suddenly, in the 1830s, along came a royal flush of apparitions and spirits. In the United States, it started with a murder in the little hamlet of Hydesville, New York, and the lowly spirit that lusted for vengeance.

When the Fox family moved to their new farm on December 11, 1847, they had two children living with them: Margaret, fourteen, and Kate, eleven. The older children had already moved away. The following year the rapping started. Bumps in the night. Rapping had been heard in Germany once in 1520 and again in England in 1716, but the Fox family knew nothing about those, and finally on March 31, 1848, young Kate challenged the unseen entity (surely a demon!) to repeat the snaps of her fingers. “Here, old Splitfoot, do as I do.” And it did. This caused a sensation! Every snap was echoed by a rap, until someone thought to make up an alphabetical code—one rap for A, two for B, and so forth—with which the entity laboriously spelled out the story of how he’d been a peddler who’d been murdered in the farmhouse and buried in the basement. That summer a party of men began to dig where the spirit had said his body was buried. They came across charcoal, lime, human hair, and the bones of a human skeleton, but it was not for another fifty-six years that the full skeleton was found in the old “spook house,” together with a peddler’s tin box, which you can see in the library at the Spiritualist community of Lily Dale in New York State.

After that a lot of people began to hear rapping and knocking. The Fox sisters toured internationally giving readings to people, exhausting them with spelling out the alphabet. When the sisters were asked in one session why the spirits were communicating now, the answer came, “It is to draw mankind together in harmony and to convince skeptics of the immortality of the soul.” (Alas! If history serves as a guide, it did no such thing; never has such slaughter been seen as in the following twentieth century.)

The Fox sisters got in way over their heads. One had a problem with alcohol, lost her child to her sister, who sued for custody; they were both attacked as frauds and for artificially creating the luminous substances seen in their séances, not to mention the table tilting, writing on slates, spirit lights, raps, and the appearance of disembodied hands. In one session recorded by Sir William Crookes, the distinguished investigator, Kate Fox’s two hands were held by Sir William while her feet rested on his, and then—“a luminous hand came down from the upper part of the room . . . took a pencil from my hand, rapidly wrote on a sheet of paper, threw the pencil down, and then rose over our heads, gradually fading into darkness.”

The Fox sisters died in the 1890s. By then the Society for Psychical Research had been founded by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and other scientific giants of the time (1882), as well as the American Society for Psychical Research (1885), located in New York City, both of which engaged in scholarly research. In 1884 the College of Psychic Studies for experiential research was founded in London. And anyone can visit these august organizations even today or have a reading from one of the many psychics and seers who study and practice at the college.

Meanwhile other remarkable mediums and intuitives were cropping up, and charges of fraud continued, sometimes with cause. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle expressed it succinctly in his book The History of Spiritualism (Complete): “there is no more connexion between physical mediumship and morality than there is between a refined ear for music and morality.”

TWO OTHER INTUITIVE GIANTS must be mentioned, though they did not always speak to spirits. Daniel Dunglas Home, born in 1833 in a village near Edinburgh, was a contemporary of the Fox sisters. He moved to the United States as a child and returned to Europe as an adult. Artistic, refined, of delicate health, with a personal repulsion for anything sordid and ugly, he moved in the highest aristocratic circles of France, Russia, Italy, and England. He had extraordinary powers, possessing all four qualities that Saint Paul termed “of the spirit.” We speak of a direct voice medium, a trance speaker, a clairvoyant, and a physical medium, this last having the ability to produce physical manifestations, and Home could do all four.

In one test, a small handbell was placed on the carpet, and it rang when nothing could have touched it; a glass of water held by the investigator above Home’s head emptied mysteriously and just as strangely refilled itself, wetting the hands of the person holding it. Many times Home was seen to levitate and float, limbs rigid and his body in a nearly horizontal position, up to the ceiling (once marking it with a pencil) or in one case out the sitting room window, passing seventy feet above the street and then back inside. He went out headfirst and returned feet first.

Home was a deeply religious man. He gave readings to such clients as the authors Edward Bulwer-Lytton and T. A. Trollope (brother of Anthony Trollope), the socialist Robert Owen, and lists of dukes, counts, and other royalty, as well as ladies of the aristocracy. He took no money for his skills and died in poverty. Home was investigated by Sir William Crookes (1832-1919), one of the leading chemical and physical scientists of his age, who began his investigations as a skeptic, believing everything was a trick, and against his best judgment was forced to confirm Home’s abilities. (This is the same Crookes who investigated the Fox sisters as well.) Crookes reports that he saw Home levitate at least fifty times. Home could visit an art gallery, stand with his back to the wall, and describe the paintings behind him in detail. At his death the British press generally denounced Home as a fraud.

One last spiritual giant requires recognition, the controversial mystic and clairvoyant Edgar Cayce, known as the Sleeping Prophet. Born 1877 on a farm in Kentucky, he began at the age of six or seven to have visions, and in those early years he also had an invisible playmate who later went away. As a boy Cayce could fall asleep lying on his schoolbooks and on waking have a photographic memory of the contents. As he grew, so did his abilities. At the age of thirteen, he had a vision of a beautiful woman who asked him what he most wanted in life. He told her that, more than anything, he wanted to help others, especially children when they were sick.

He was a loving husband, the father of two children, a skilled photographer, a devoted Sunday-school teacher, and an eager gardener. Yet for forty-three years as an adult, Cayce would lie down, fold his hands over his stomach, and go into a meditative or “sleeping” or trance state, in which he could commune with people around the world and answer questions of every type, from hiccups to the secrets of the universe. He didn’t know what he said in these readings. Gradually their range expanded from medical diagnoses to theology, education, soul journeys, spirituality, and psychology. After some years, with the help of a secretary, he began to keep records. To provide confidentiality, each reading was given a numerical code, and copies of 14,000 of his readings, guided by his wife and recorded by his secretary, are available to the public at the Association for Research and Enlightenment, Inc. (A.R.E.), a research body that he founded in 1931 in Virginia Beach, Virginia. In addition to A.R.E., he founded a hospital and a university.

When individuals asked Edgar Cayce how to become more psychic, he answered that the goal is simply to become more spiritual, “for psychic is of the soul,” he said, and as you become more spiritual, the abilities develop naturally. If the individual is not interested in spiritual betterment, he should leave the skills alone.

BY 1944, at the height of World War II, Cayce was giving eight readings a day, though even his own intuition urged him to offer no more than two a day, to slow down, stop. But sacks of mail streamed in each day, importuning him, and he felt such an obligation to ease the suffering he saw that he finally collapsed with a stroke. He died January 3, 1945, followed three months later by the wife who had supported and aided his work since their engagement in 1897, when Cayce was twenty and Gertrude in her teens.

Through his visions and readings, Edgar Cayce came to believe in reincarnation, and he found it compatible with the devotion he brought to Christianity. (There is compelling evidence for it. I refer you to the work of Dr. Ian Stevenson, psychiatrist at the University of Virginia, who has found three thousand substantiated cases of reincarnation worldwide.)

I’M AMUSED, BEMUSED, at people getting together to go out spirit hunting with their digital cameras and audio equipment, nightly stalking the haunted homes, churches, granges, and community centers reputed to house ghosts. They record the whispers of disembodied entities on tape or catch on film the orbs of light that will scientifically verify the invisible spirit presence.

Perhaps the tape reveals the squeak of a footstep, as if someone were treading on a loose board. Sometimes the camera shows streaks of light or orbs. Most images on the film are the products of dust, bugs, mist, fog, a camera strap, or misplaced thumb, but sometimes, I’m told, a discarnate spirit appears in the form of a blob of light. The ghost hunters are serious about their work and join clubs and leagues. The Mid-Atlantic Paranormal Research Council (MAPRC) is one such group, and its members are normal, ordinary folk. They are educated, informed, engaged, and curious—the kind of people you’d meet at any social function.

I have no interest in joining them. I find myself rebelling against their work. What I’m saying is that I believe, and in the next breath don’t, reverting to the protection of intellectual distaste. When I see a spirit myself or whenever I have a premonition or intuition myself, I believe. I trust. When caught up in the magnificence of a mystical encounter, I believe. But when something happens to the person standing next to me while I see nothing . . . I don’t know what to think.

It is very difficult to rearrange one’s ideas so as to fit these new facts in. Once one has accepted them, it does not seem a very big step to believe in ghosts and bogies. The idea that our bodies move simply according to the known laws of physics . . . would be one of the first to go.

ALAN TURING, mathematician who helped break the German Enigma cryptograph machine during World War II

SPIRITS, GHOSTS, DEVAS, POOKAS, and poltergeists—the superstition of it all! On one level I find these things revolting. Soon we’ll be back in pagan times, when every tree and stump and spring and rocky cliff was thought to harbor its own god, to whom a traveler had better make appropriate sacrifice if he wished to pass unscathed.

And yet I heard my mother’s voice after she’d died, calling me out of sleep by my childhood nickname: “Wake up! Wake up!” Urging me to hurry to meet my friends. And not long ago I stayed in the two-hundred-year-old house of a friend in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, where I was awakened in the night by a patter of fairy footsteps and then a sinking of the bed as someone sat down on it. The cat, I thought, even as I knew it was a spirit leaning over curiously to examine me. I was not afraid. It got up a moment later and drifted silently away: no cat.

It’s a truism that before any scientific discovery is made its creative thinker is often despised, condemned. We think of Dr. Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis (1818-1865), then working in the Vienna General Hospital, who proposed in 1847 that the high death rate of mothers who delivered in hospital might be reduced if the doctors who moved directly from performing an autopsy to delivering the baby merely washed their hands in a chlorine solution before touching the mother. He found that this simple procedure reduced the deaths in his hospital from 10 percent to 1 or 2 percent. Nonetheless he was so vilified, humiliated, and harassed that he was forced to move to Pest. He ended his life in a mental institution, where in a twist of fate he died of the septicemia he tried to prevent. This was in 1864, before Pasteur discovered the germ theory that corroborated his insight.

Another example is William Harvey, who in 1628 declared that the heart acted as a pump, circulating blood throughout the body and that it could be heard as a pulse or heartbeat. His idea was considered ridiculous, since everyone knew that the body was controlled by humors, a theory propounded by the Greek anatomist Galen a thousand years before; and such is the power of suggestion that when the doctors of Harvey’s time tried to test his outlandish proposal they really could not hear the heartbeat that would have proved his case.