Desperate to be believed, Steve arrived intent upon proving that what he was experiencing was real. He looked so vulnerable. I had a strong impulse to comfort him; his entire identity was at risk. He reminded me of a child who had gone astray, starving for validation. But I had to be careful not to get hooked in because of similar feelings I had while growing up. To be helpful, I knew I had to remain objective.
Steve channeled the Sun Spirits for me, but nothing about them felt authentic. When the voices came through him, they were often critical and cruel. “You're ugly and fat,” they would snap. “It's pathetic that at twenty-six you can't even support yourself.” Then in the next breath they would proclaim, “Love is everything. We've chosen you to spread the word.” I felt compassion for Steve, appreciated the hell he'd been through. It was a miracle he had made it out of prison alive. I didn't want to take the rug out from under him, yet I had to be honest. His demonstration didn't convey the wholesome, true feeling of a genuine psychic experience. There was a psychotic flavor to it, a bizarre, condemning tone that rang false. The Sun Spirits seemed more a reflection of Steve's disowned feelings, mainly negative. It was clear that in order to cope with and survive the trauma of prison, a part of his personality had splintered off.
This was definitely not what Steve wanted to hear. He had big plans to market himself, to get his message across to the public by going on the spiritual lecture circuit. In fact, he had found an adoring girlfriend who considered him an enlightened being and was planning to accompany him on the road. Because I wasn't willing to agree that his channeling was psychic, I could make no impact on Steve. He never returned to see me. The last his family heard of him, he was with his girlfriend somewhere in the Midwest, penniless, trying to attract a following.
From working with Steve and many others like him, I developed a feel for when it's appropriate to encourage the psychic and when it isn't. Timing is critical. Most important, you must first start with a solid emotional base. Otherwise, exploring the psychic may only make matters worse. This is especially true if you try to force an opening when you're not ready. Overdoing spiritual workshops or consulting teachers excessively may place too much pressure on you, so much so that in your zealousness to progress, you get frustrated or burned out. Then, too, there's the glaring example of overeager people with visionary aspirations ending up floridly psychotic on hallucinogenic drugs. Over the years, I've seen too many of them land in emergency rooms, strapped to a gurney with hard leather restraints, bound at the ankles and wrists, being shot up with Thorazine to bring them down. Just as a tree needs to have its toots firmly planted in the earth so as not to get blown away, your foundation must also be sturdy. Only then will there be no danger that you'll get overwhelmed. With patience, the psychic can evolve organically.
One of the healthy, positive routes you can take to the psychic—and perhaps the most powerful—is creative expression. There's something inherently balancing about it when you're swept up in the flow. At these times, you're giving birth to what is most true in you, not solely from the standpoint of the intellect but from your deepest recesses. Overthinking kills creativity, as it does the psychic. The magic comes when you give up mental control and allow a greater force to take hold. In this groove you can be showered with original ideas and intuitive insights. All systems alert, you're so ripe for inspiration that it floods right through you.
My friend Janus, a screenwriter, rarely thinks about being psychic. But she is. Early one morning, she was awakened by a dream in which the plot of an involved story was perfectly laid out. It was about a crooked evangelist who's afraid he has performed a legitimate miracle when a young boy is healed by his touch. Janus sprung out of bed and rushed into the kitchen where her husband was drinking tea. When she told the dream to him, he was enthusiastic: “Write it down,” he said, “it's a terrific idea.” Immediately she flipped on her computer. When the story actually seemed to write itself, she knew she had a hot script. Janus's husband, a producer, eventually sold it—and it was made into the film
Leap of Faith,
starring Steve Martin.
Janus frequently dreams her story lines. To her, it's the most natural thing in the world. “The most magical moments in my work are when I step out of the way,” she says. “Dreams are the ultimate means to do this.” Whenever she faces a problem in her writing, she consciously puts herself into the troublesome scene as she drifts off to sleep. An observer in her own dream, she watches the action and the motivation of the characters play out. This gives her a running start on finding a solution. I know many writers who routinely use similar techniques.
Robert Louis Stevenson, for example, drew on his dreams for the classic thriller
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,
the story of a prominent doctor who is transformed into a serial killer. I was fascinated when I first read Stevenson's account of his creative process: “I had long been trying to write a story on this subject, to find a body, a vehicle, for that strong sense of man's double being which must at times come in upon and overwhelm the mind of all thinking creatures…. For two days I went about wracking my brains for a plot of any sort; and on the second night I dreamed the scene at the window and a scene afterwards split in two, in which Hyde, pursued for some crime, took the powder and underwent the change in the presence of his pursuers. All the rest was made awake and consciously.”
From his description, I knew that Stevenson had tapped into a psychic source. My feeling was confirmed when he spoke of the amazing “Little People.” They instructed him beat by beat what each section of a story would be, even keeping an eye on the needs of the literary marketplace. Stevenson saw his conscious self as the “Little People's” agent, transcribing their ideas verbatim.
To me, this is the epitome of psychic creativity. Every time I hear about artists who are directed through dreams, voices, or visions I am moved. An extraordinary fluidity and layers of possibility exist in these states. The intensity of the creative process, the surrender required to get to the really good stuff inside, is exactly what fuels the psychic. Stevenson's approach made great art because he was able to travel to inner places most people never have access to. It wasn't something he tediously labored over. The very spirit of his work carried him there.
When you immerse yourself in creative projects, whether or not you think of what you're doing as psychic, you place yourself in an intuitively supercharged state. Passionately focused on your work, you set your intellect aside and shift out of ordinary awareness. Once in a creative rhythm, a wellspring of colors, sounds, and images appears. You, as the artist, simply take dictation. The painter Joan Miró worked in just this way: Rather than interpreting his dreams, he replicated them intact, in brilliant colors on canvas.
Of course, you won't be constantly racing ahead at full speed. Just as the psychic ebbs and flows, so do rhythms and cycles of the creative. When we go through those frustrating days or even months when it seems like nothing much is happening, it's futile to force it. There is no way to hurry a rose to bloom. These are breathing spells, intervals of gestation, moments when we must relax and allow the wisdom we have gained to incubate gently. The poet Rilke describes the artist's path when he says, after the storms of spring, summer comes “only to those who are patient, who are there as though eternity lay before them.”
It's easy to lose sight of this. Sometimes when I write I find myself tense and laboring at the computer, muscles tight, jaw clenched, getting nowhere fast. I'm trying too hard, need some time off, perhaps to hop into my car and drive up the coast. With the top down, my hair wild in the breeze, my spirit can soar again. While I'm listening to a tape of Muddy Waters—I'm crazy about the blues—collecting seashells on the beach, watching kids bobbing up and down on the Santa Monica Pier merry-go-round, or thinking about nothing in particular, fresh ideas have the space to float in.
Then there are those graced periods when my writing is effortless, the psychic flowing so abundantly I can hardly catch it all. Entire days can fly by when I even forget to eat. I keep notepads stashed near my bed, by the bathtub, on the passenger seat of the car. I won't hesitate to pull over by the side of the road, stop a conversation in midstream, or wake up in the middle of the night to get down my ideas. These are exhilarated moments of being in sync, when the energy I've gathered during the dormant phase comes into fruition.
I believe that all forms of creative and psychic expression originate from an infinitely fertile spiritual source. In the same way that artists create, visionaries peer into the invisible. The painter Paul Klee recognized this when he said, “Art does not reproduce the visible. It makes visible.” To me, the shared challenge of both psychics and artists is to translate the intangible into material form. This can take the shape of a novel, a painting, a song, or may come through as a prediction about the future. The kind of information we pick up depends on our intention. Any creative endeavor can provide a medium to help the psychic grow.
I have a patient, Molly, a painter who is proof of this. For my birthday, she once gave me one of her watercolors, a painting of a grove of deep green California oaks nestled high atop a chaparral-dotted Malibu crest. I have it hanging on my office wall. It's more than just beautiful: It actually seems to manufacture light. The otherworldly colors are vibrantly braided within each brushstroke; a fine golden hue flickers right through. The first time I saw it, I instantly sensed its power.
During creative spurts Molly possesses the same quality of presence and openness that I've been privileged to feel during my best readings. For her, there is no time more joyous. “I don't even have to think about what I'm doing,” she says, “I feel energized. Ideas seem to shoot through me right onto the canvas.” This is a psychic state; it feeds Molly's art and in turn is fed by it.
Like Molly, I always know when I'm really on. Then, doing a reading has the freedom and expansiveness of riding a horse bareback across a sunlit flowered field. There's a depth of sight and effortlessness that takes over when I can let go just enough to surrender. This is the real thrill of the psychic, the same vital energy fueling creative flow. Without it my prescience would surely be diminished, the artist reduced to mere technician, a tiny speck of light compared to a radiant orb.
I am in awe of how infinitely creative the psychic can be. One day at lunch a friend excitedly told me about a Brazilian psychologist and clairvoyant, Luis Gasparetto, whom she had just witnessed. “He has no formal artistic training,” she said, “but he claims that a number of the great masters—Renoir, Picasso, Modigliani, Van Gogh, and others—psychically express themselves through him. He whips out drawings in no time that look like the originals.” I wanted to see for myself. Unfortunately, that was his last Los Angeles engagement scheduled for a while, so it wasn't possible. Curious, I tracked down a videotape of that night and scrutinized him to see if he was for real or somehow faking it. I'm a tough audience when it comes to these things. The integrity of the psychic is just too important to me; I won't diminish this gift by accepting “magic” or trickery.
Lying back on my bed, I switched on the VCR. Gasparetto, a youthful man of about forty, barely spoke a word the whole time. His eyes shut, listening to classical music at full blast, he used both his hands and feet simultaneously to produce as many as four drawings in a matter of minutes, all similar enough to the style of the great masters that an untrained eye might easily confuse the two. Reaching for tubes of paint, never once looking at them, he later remarked, “I choose the colors by instinct. I sense them in my body, feel them in my skin.” Without ever using any brushes, he squeezes the paint onto a canvas, applying pressure with his fingers, the heel of his hand, his knuckles, and his feet, furiously spreading it around, sometimes even working upside down. It is truly an astonishing sight: He moves at such speed, and his limbs are so finely coordinated, that he looks more like an automaton than a human being.
I do not know if this man is actually channeling the great masters, as he says he does. I believe, however, that he is extremely open to the creative flow and that his intuitive connection with the style of certain artists allows him to impressively reproduce their paintings. In this he is quite gifted. I saw in Gasparetto a refined demonstration of the psychic and the creative working together in harmony.
Unfortunately, I've also run into gifted people who don't al ways use their power well. I've seen genuine psychic ability mixed with a lack of maturity and discernment. This is a lethal combination. Motivated by gigantic egos, seduced by an insatiable need to control, these individuals lose their sense of balance and their priorities. Too many times I've known of people like this who prey on the innocence and naiveté of vulnerable seekers. I get furious whenever I hear of someone voluntarily handing over her power to irresponsible teachers who greedily snatch it up.
I met such a man recently. A friend of mine called late at night to rave about a Peruvian shaman, a wondrous healer he felt I just had to see. The shaman would only be in town for a few days; my friend could arrange an appointment. I usually don't consult healers other than my own spiritual teacher; I prefer to stay focused on one path. But between my curiosity, the fact that I'd had some annoying stomach trouble lately that could really use help, and my friend's insistence, I agreed to check him out.
The signs were ominous from the beginning. The shaman charged an exorbitant fee for his services—to be paid strictly in cash—and made claims of fantastic cures. My friend argued, “He's better than Carlos Castaneda's Don Juan. What difference does money make if he's for real?” The whole thing didn't feel right. But after all this time and study, there was still a part of me that wished for a miraculous cure-all, a healer who could wave his magic wand and make everything okay.