During psychic readings, I don't reveal anything without considering the implications. Always I ask myself, Will this information be helpful? Even with people like Joan, when I believe it will be, I'm still careful about my presentation. There are so many ways to go wrong. I know of a well-meaning psychic who was asked by a single mother to do a reading of her newborn daughter. The psychic revealed the possibility that the child would be learning disabled. On hearing this, the mother looked as if she had been run over by a truck. This was the last thing she wanted to know. As a forecast of the future, even if true, all it accomplished was to plant fear in her—in this case no useful purpose was served. Though another mother might have wanted this knowledge, it was still a judgment call. The balance between when or when not to speak out can be incredibly delicate.
I find this to be particularly critical in potentially life-threatening circumstances. Dropping a bomb on someone that they have cancer or AIDS can often cause more harm than good. Then there's also the chance that my perceptions are inaccurate. Readings are not infallible. In such situations, I tend to err on the conservative side, stressing the gravity of my concerns without getting specific. I point people in the right direction by strongly urging them to get checked out medically, but they must take it from there.
In some instances, it's inappropriate to do a reading at all. Just as I would never walk through somebody's front door without an invitation, I never look into someone psychically unless there's an opening. When I try to tune in and it feels like I'm hitting a brick wall, I know to back off. An invisible force field repels me. Even if someone has requested a reading, something inside them is resisting. Images I pick up don't congeal, or they blur like a fading watercolor. Other times I just draw a blank, or feel there's nothing substantial to grab on to. Any attempt to push through such protective barricades would be an invasion of privacy.
Psychic balance entails communicating what you know with respect, being discriminating but also trusting your heart to guide you when to act. Confidence doesn't come overnight, but when you make the effort to balance the psychic, you gain both energy and stability. At home with your prescience, you are now free to enter new realms, at the same time still well grounded. Like a martial-arts master, you stand poised and centered, intuitively in tune wherever you are.
Not that this means you can't be at ease, free of pretense, a part of the ordinary, daily world, in any situation. Some of my most impressive psychic insights have come to me while driving, shopping, walking by the ocean, or even sitting on the swings at Venice Beach. I often go there when I'm stuck and need to figure things out. Facing the boardwalk, hands gripping the cool chain links, I push off barefoot from the sand. Swinging high, I take in the fabulous pageant of people passing just a few feet away: couples jogging in matching skin-tight magenta shorts; a group of young black boys gyrating to a rap tape; futuristic-looking roller skaters who could have stepped straight out of
Bladerunner.
As I continue to swing my mind clears, psychic images rush by. Answers occur to me as naturally as if I were on an isolated mountain peak. In the midst of this whirlwind of activity, there's a special sweetness in knowing I can be completely at one with it all.
T
HE
S
PIRITUAL
P
ATH OF THE
P
SYCHIC
Seeing into darkness is clarity…
Use your own light
and return to the source of light.
—T
AO
T
E
C
HING
(
TRANS, BY
S
TEPHEN
M
ITCHELL
)
The afternoon sky is a deep azure, so tranquil and pure I rise up in spirit, hovering high above the earth. Caressed by a soft summer breeze, I gaze down at a lush expanse of fertile undulating hills. Nestled there is the quaint East German village of Weimar. The scene is idyllic. Hearing my cousin Irene's voice yelling, “Judith, hurry up,” I return to earth, taking in one last look…before I meet the horror that awaits me only a few steps away.
It's the summer of 1991. I am walking down a barren concrete path, about to enter the death camp at Buchenwald. A chillingly sinister contrast to the peaceful landscape above. Staring up at the looming stone guard tower, I can make out every bare inch of its still-intact metal gun mounts. Swallowing hard, I strain to keep my composure, but the ground itself seems to be tugging at my feet like quicksand. There is no past or future, only this moment. I feel the ghosts of the dead everywhere.
I had just arrived in Germany the day before. Even at the Frankfurt airport the sound of German echoing through the loudspeakers was eerily unnerving. Rationally, I knew the Holocaust had happened over fifty years ago. But I was both a Jewish woman and a psychic; an inner instinct responded. The threat of annihilation pierced through to my core. The German men and women I talked to couldn't have been friendlier. I was well aware of that, yet still a part of me feared that if I made one wrong move I would be found out and seized. Until then, persecution of an entire people was a terror I had only vaguely identified with when my mother had expressed it while I was growing up. Now I understood her feelings better.
On a train to Bavaria to join Irene, I shared sweet rolls and coffee with a woman doctor from Nuremberg I had just met, chatting away with her as if nothing were wrong. But as I looked out the window at the fairy-tale countryside speckled with castles and meadows of wildflowers, I cringed, psychically sensing the history of this picture-perfect setting imprinted like a malignant afterimage.
Something compelled me to visit a concentration camp. I couldn't not go. I was curious—curious to see for myself what one was really like, not just to shed light on my Jewish past but to really register the malevolent extremes humans are capable of if unchecked. I wasn't sure how or why, but somehow this knowing was going to make me feel more whole.
Now here I was with Irene, an English teacher at an American military base in Germany, her new BMW parked in the visitors' lot a million miles away. And hell, bounded by a sea of barbed wire, stretching out before us. The camp has been preserved down to the smallest detail, just as it looked in the war. The point, of course, is to remember.
Shivering though the day is warm, we pass through the arch beneath the ominous tower. A stifling grayness descends. We tour the grounds, entering the crematorium, the gas chamber hideously disguised as a shower room, and the building where the “medical” experimentation took place. Climbing the winding stairway, we enter the prisoners' barracks, stark and airless. Disturbingly sparse handfuls of straw cover multileveled wooden platforms where human beings slept three to a bed, hundreds to a room.
I sense their presence. They are prowling the camp, brushing against me. I'm starting to feel vaguely nauseous, numb. My breathing turns shallow, barely perceptible. I notice myself becoming suspiciously calm, frozen inside. I get this way whenever I'm really scared. Yet the truth that is calling out to me far surpasses my fear.
Drawn to better understand the meaning of the darkness, I instinctively go off on my own—an old carryover from childhood, to retreat within whenever I feel overwhelmed. Fighting an impulse to cut off the experience, I sit on the remains of a rectangular cement foundation at the far end of the camp. It was at this spot that the public executions were carried out. Ironically, despite the eeriness of the setting, I feel safest alone. I close my eyes to meditate, not knowing where it will take me. My light cotton blouse feels as though it could be ripped off at any moment by the sheer accumulation of so much inhumane violence committed here and still present now. I cross my arms around my chest, holding it tight.
As I quiet myself in meditation, I can psychically feel the echo of the atrocities that occurred in this place, leaving my body leaden and chilled. I see every detail of the camp vibrating at tremendous speed. Transfixed, I marvel as the intensity of the motion strips away the surface of everything in sight, revealing a pervasive blanket of darkness beneath. It is a toxic, gritty film pulsating ever so slightly, infiltrating the scene, leaching every last molecule of vitality and tainting the very air I breathe. At the same time, I'm deluged by voices and images of people I believe were captive here. It's happening so fast I can't hold on to any of the words. The darkness is insinuating itself on me. I'm lost in it; nothing I've encountered previously begins to compare with this nightmare. I feel my sense of self weakening. Fortunately, I recognize in a flash of insight the stranglehold the darkness has on me: All I can think about is getting away from this place. Joked out of my meditation, I open my eyes, grasping onto the wall's cold cement blocks with both hands. I need to touch something solid and firm to reassure me that I'm okay. I stand up, my legs still unsteady beneath me. I hurry back through the archway under the guard tower and leave.
The memory of the camp haunted me the rest of my trip through Eastern Europe and for weeks following my return home. I felt lethargic and depressed, aching all over as if coming down with the flu. But I wasn't physically ill—I just felt utterly defeated by the darkness. It seemed so ferocious, so incomparable in its destructive force. Not that I hadn't been aware of this darkness before. It had been trailing me my entire life, just in lesser forms. When I was a child, it was the boogeyman, the clattering of the wooden shutters against my window on a windy night, or the spookiness of being all alone in a big, empty house. It lurked in shadowy corners, intimidating me at a distance but never fully showing its face. I'd always counted on the ultimate triumph of love over evil, but now my faith was shaken. Love didn't seem to have a fighting chance.
Soon after getting back to Los Angeles, I climbed one of the highest peaks of Malibu Creek State Park, overlooking the ocean, to get some perspective. The earth was warm from the morning sun, and I found a smooth, rounded boulder on which to meditate. This land, held sacred by the Chumash tribe, is where I feel most secure. The V-shaped canyons sheltering me in their arms like a mother, the grand old oaks venerating a silent wisdom, and the earth carpeted with golden mustard, all delighted me. There was peace here, always waiting to be found.
Sitting cross-legged, in an old pair of jeans I love so much, I breathed in deeply and began to meditate. Within minutes, however, I found myself transported back to Buchenwald. I was completely disoriented; it took every ounce of restraint I had to stay present. Not this again, I thought, sinking at the sight. Still, there it was: that terrible darkness, outstretched before me, in complete view. But this time I didn't bolt away. Comforted by the safety of the canyon, I cautiously sneaked a closer look. Here on familiar turf, courage was easier to summon. To my surprise, I recognized a dimension I'd missed while at the camp: The faintest glow of light flickered through every structure, even the ground itself, building the more I focused on it. Single-mindedly I watched, thinking of nothing else, feeling a mounting sense of love. Right before my eyes, it appeared to be birthing itself, light bearing light in a breathtaking spectacle. Pure, luminous, penetrating even the blackest crevices, it extended far beyond the electrified barbed-wire fences and into the sky.
In the face of such magnificence, my fear fell away. I drank it in, memorizing every nuance so I'd never forget or again feel so desolate. Reconnecting with this light, I felt as though I'd found once more my dearest love. I realized it had been there all the time. Consumed by feat, however, I just hadn't looked far enough to see it. Rigid before, my body softened, a flood of energy rushing through me. I breathed easily for the first time in weeks, smelled the aroma of pungent sage and rosemary growing in patches on the canyon slopes. Dwarfed by the enormity of this radiance, the darkness seemed minuscule, and yet the two were intimately linked. It looked as if the light were holding the darkness deep within its belly, sharing the same blood supply. In that moment, I began to grasp what I later better understood: that even in the worst depravity, the light can still exist. It is only our fear that blinds us to it.
I cannot, of course, claim the unspeakable experiences at Buchenwald as my own. Nor do I want in any way to diminish the misery there by making too facile a connection to my own fortunate life. Nonetheless, my visit to Buchenwald had the effect of compelling me to start exploring the meaning of darkness in the world. It was the first step of an ongoing process. Such issues are more easily stated than resolved, but I keep searching for greater clarity.
The psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, one of my heroes, has guided my thinking. In
Man's Search for Meaning,
he courageously portrays the years he spent as a prisoner in Auschwitz:
In spite of all the enforced physical and mental primitiveness of the life in a concentration camp, it was possible for spiritual life to deepen…. Only in this way can we explain the apparent paradox that some prisoners of a less hardy makeup often seemed to survive camp life better than those of a robust nature. The salvation of man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world may still know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his, beloved. For the first time in my life I was able to understand the meaning of the words, “The angels are lost in the perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory.”
Though I've been spared what Frankl confronted, I've come to believe that the spiritual path of the psychic is to face both the dark and the light—not to sever a portion of life and see only what pleases us. Many people may initially recoil at the idea that we all contain a spectrum of dark and light with the potential to act both out. But we must be warriors, alert to the multiple forces in and around us. Thus we must search deep inside to identify and topple our fiercest demons. And then heal that part of ourselves. At the same time, we must tend what is most admirable within, embracing our truest strengths. All for the purpose of edging closer to the source of light from which we have come.