Our ultimate goal is to become more awake. To appreciate from all angles the stunning complexity of who we are. Consider also that even in the most dire of circumstances, there exists a possibility for magnificence and connection to spirit. As Frankl suggests, we can create a life founded on love anywhere. Spirituality means connecting with our hearts and a higher power; the psychic can help open ourselves to do this. However, it's not the only way; to borrow an expression from the writer Raymond Carver, it's just “another path to the waterfall.” But as your prescience matures, you become more of a transparent vehicle, able to experience multiple layers of reality that deepen your spiritual appreciation. A channel opens, your armor falls away, love is easier to feel and it can move you.
Spirituality is not an abstract concept from a psychic perspective. It's always right before you—manifested through dreams, visions, and intuitions—but you must make it come alive. Live it, breathe it, recognize it even in the minutiae of your life. As you do, you discover we're not just two dimensional beings bounded by our skin. Indians recognize this in the sweetness of their greeting to each other, saying,
“Nameste,”
“I respect the spirit within you,” instead of “Hello.” This spirit is in us all, psychically unmistakable and vast. The poet Kabir describes it so well:
There is a Secret One inside us;
the planets and all the galaxies
pass through his hands like beads.
This is a string of beads one should look at with luminous eyes.
(Trans, by Robert Bly)
Our prescience provides this. The advantage to being psychic is not simply to see more but to make sense of what we see. When everything comes together and even seemingly disconnected pieces click into place, it satisfies our most inquisitive impulses. Our ultimate reward as psychics, however, if we are also spiritually open, is to be able to glimpse the incredible light I encountered at Buchenwald—which, by the way, is everywhere. For me, feeling such love for even a few minutes a day is finding heaven on earth. Nothing is more healing.
My trip to Buchenwald and the psychic insight I gained are precious to me. With the power of love reaffirmed, I came away more able to find it in any circumstance, no matter how extreme. By viewing every experience as a gift, life has become more fulfilling and a lot less painful. On the most frozen, iciest of slopes, if you look closely enough, there will always be the tiniest of flowers. This is the great wonder. The most demanding spiritual challenge is to search for the light in any situation, even when things seem to be utterly unfair. A hard lesson, certainly. But one well learned.
Searching for the light may be difficult because we tend to be mesmerized by darkness. Our fear of it eclipses the light. Such fear is so primal and firmly embedded that it's powerfully reflected in how we react to the forces of nature. I've never seen an author capture this more masterfully than Annie Dillard in her story “Solar Eclipse”:
People on all the hillsides, including, I think, myself, screamed when the black body of the moon detached from the sky and rolled over the sun. But something else was happening at that same instant, and it was this, I believe, which made us scream: The second before the sun went out we saw a wall of dark shadow come speeding at us. We no sooner saw it than it was upon us, like thunder. It roared up the valley. It slammed our hill and knocked us out. It was the monstrous swift shadow cone of the moon…. It rolled at you across the land at 1,800 miles an hour, hauling darkness like plague behind it…. We saw the wall of shadow coming, and screamed before it hit.
Darkness comes in all forms, from without and within. Yet I believe that when we become conscious of our darker side we're less likely to be seduced by it—this awareness helps us not to get sucked in. By confronting our anger, hurt, fear, and resentments, we can refine our spirits like a finely polished diamond. As Gandhi says, “We must be the change.” Coming to terms with our own darkness can help us find peace. It's not only liberating for us, it can also profoundly affect how other people behave in our presence.
Late one summer afternoon I was driving my white VW Rabbit, heading for Chinatown to meet a friend for dinner. Even though I was passing through a seedy neighborhood, the weather was so sticky and hot that I had unwisely rolled all the windows down. When I stopped at a red light, an enormous man, large enough to play defensive tackle for the Raiders, suddenly darted from the corner bus stop and rushed toward me. I saw him leap up onto the hood of my car and felt a gigantic thud as he began to bounce up and down as if on a trampoline. It all happened so fast I didn't have time to get scared. Before I had a chance to close my window, he stuck his arm through it and grabbed for my head. I was sure he was going to strike me. Instead, his rage evaporated. He gently cupped my face in his hands. Gazing straight into my eyes, he smiled so sweetly, like a baby, that I couldn't help but smile back. Then, as abruptly as he'd appeared, he dodged through traffic mumbling to himself, returned to the crowded bus stop, and sat down. When the light turned green, I continued on, disbelieving, but grateful I was still in one piece.
That man was quite capable of hurting me, but he didn't, and I kept asking myself why. As I replayed the scene in my head over the next couple of days, I came to understand. For one thing, I couldn't look more nonthreatening; I don't go through life giving off a lot of fear or expecting at any moment to be attacked—qualities that, according to self-defense classes, count for a lot. But on an energy level, I believe the answer goes deeper. We all radiate an energy field that extends way beyond the body, an “aura,” which is partially a reflection of our emotional state. Others can often feel it, even if they don't identify it as such. Anger in particular is easy to sense. In certain situations, when people walk around dangerously close to the edge like the man I encountered, it can set them off.
This is where the work I'd done on myself really served me. Because I make a concerted effort to deal with my more difficult emotions and then let them go, there was less of a buildup for this man to zero in on psychically. Instead, at a subtle energy level, he responded to a more peaceful part of me and smiled instead of tearing my head off (though probably none of this was conscious on his part). Sometimes violence cannot be stopped no matter what we do. But the more peaceful we are, the better chance we have of bringing out the peace in those around us.
It's all too tempting to project our darker sides onto something outside ourselves. After all, the bad guys who make the eleven o'clock news are easy targets. Their actions are so glaring they're hard to identify with. But it also happens in a less obvious way. As a psychiatrist, I see people who project all the time. The qualities they most resist in themselves are the ones they project onto others. For instance, I once treated an extremely successful dentist who was a pathological liar, but he'd come to me complaining that everyone else was cheating him. His beliefs were so fixed, I barely made a dent in them. Even after being convicted of fraud, he swore he was framed and trusted no one.
Projection is a primitive, unconscious instinct learned in childhood. It takes years of effort to unlearn. Even the other day when I stubbed my toe on a doorjamb, my first inclination was to blame the door rather than admit my own clumsiness. Projection distorts our view of the world and prevents us from understanding each other and ourselves. But being psychic demands clarity, so that we can see beyond our own projections. Only then can we appreciate people and situations as they actually are, not how we imagine them. The commitment that comes with being on a spiritual path impels us to clean up our acts at every opportunity.
For two years I was a medical consultant at a residential alcohol and drug recovery program for Jewish criminal offenders. As part of our outreach services, several counselors and I visited a high-security men's prison in Chino to celebrate Passover with some of the inmates. The other women knew the ins and outs of the prison system, had come here on many occasions, but this was my first time. I was eager to experience what a prison was like from the inside—to get a better feel for the men in our program. But my interest went beyond that: I wanted to learn more about freedom, and sensed that somehow these men could teach me.
To get from the front entrance of the facility to the compound where the seder was being held, we were escorted through the enormous yard by a group of heavily armed guards who could have been clones of Arnold Schwarzenegger. Walled off on all sides were hundreds of uniformed men robotically smoking cigarettes, all jammed together in an outdoor concrete area the size of three city blocks.
As we walked by, we became the main attraction. I felt invaded by the men, their eyes devouring us like we were raw meat as they taunted us with cat calls. I had the sensation that we were passing through a sea of “hungry ghosts,” the lost souls that Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hahn talks about, those who can never be fulfilled. They were sitting ducks for everything that was terrible in the world to be projected smack onto them. I knew better, but I felt threatened, and silently judged them, too. Yet I couldn't stop staring at the swarm of anonymous faces pulling me in. My friends' voices sounded far away, muffled. For a few moments, I must have fallen into a trance, because there again I could psychically see the darkness that had infested Buchenwald, only present to a lesser degree. It was spewing out from the men's hair, their breath, their skin—slinking across ledges of buildings, creeping up closer toward me. No light in sight. Why couldn't I see it? Because of my experience at the concentration camp, I questioned myself. I knew something inside me had shut off.
What a relief it was to arrive safely inside at our destination. Thank God for the familiar. The rabbi, wrapped in a blue and white prayer shawl, his yarmulke pinned to the little hair he had left, the Torah safely nearby…the baskets piled high with matzohs and plates of gefilte fish about to be served. Now I could catch my breath. Waiting for the seder to begin, the inmate seated beside me started to strike up a conversation. A tattooed, muscle-bound man with long, curly, black hair, he immediately got mileage out of my obvious discomfort.
“Never been to a prison before, huh?”
“Nope,” I managed to get out.
“Well, I've been in the joint for over ten years.”
“What for?” I inquired politely, trying to seem like this was no big deal.
“I'm a bank robber,” he boasted. “Big time.”
“Oh really,” I cooed, wanting to appear duly impressed. He just shook his head back and forth, grinning. I felt like such a fool. Then, with a twinkle in his eyes, he said, “You see those ugly gorillas out there.” He pointed gleefully to the crowded yard. “Well, they could eat a little girl like you up in one big bite.” The whole thing seemed so absurd, both of us burst out laughing. The ice was broken.
During dinner, I found him to be an extraordinary man. “It took being in prison to get my spiritual life to open up,” he told me. A voracious reader, he deftly quoted the Buddha, Krishnamurti, Ramana Maharshi, his mentors. Their pictures were taped to the walls of his cell. He was a daily meditator, devoted to his practice—more so than many people I knew. But most impressive was his outrageous humor, the lightness with which he approached life. I never detected a hint of feeling sorry for himself. Amazingly, under dreadful conditions, he'd been able to heal.
When the seder ended, the guards safely escorted us back through the yard to the front exit. The physical scene hadn't changed—the same hordes of men, the same cigarette smoke, the same taunts—but now my take on it was different. Psychically, the darkness I saw was no longer one-dimensional. Its denseness had broken up, revealing an underlayer of phosphorescent pinpoints—each one no larger than a grain of sand—as if a pitch black night sky was now sprinkled with glittering stars. The very atoms and molecules of everyone and everything seemed to be radiating, piercing the entire environment like lasers. It was a loving light, so soothing I just wanted to bask in it. Once I had a single bare speck to hold on to, a focal point, I looked on as offshoots multiplied, growing brighter and brighter. It was a very strange sight, awesome. I was watching hardened criminals lurking around lit up like lightbulbs and they didn't even realize it.
My dinner partner unknowingly had been the key. Talking with him had deflated my fear because he so strikingly defied my projections. The light in him sparked my ability to see. True, many of the inmates were intimidating—for good reason. And on a psychic level, a visible darkness surrounded them that to me was quite real. The distortion was that it was all I saw. I'd been so afraid and angry at how invaded I felt that my projections went wild. The minute I started to withdraw them, to look beyond outward appearances at our similarities and common failings, the light that had always been present was able to shine through. My myopic vision of the prison shattered; the ball of frozen tension inside me burst along with it. I felt free. Now I grasped the larger picture, not just a fraction of it. I realized that given other circumstances I too might be propelled to commit criminal acts. I'd never held up a liquor store, joined a gang, or been busted for drugs, but could appreciate the desperation that leads to such behavior. We all feel anger, disappointment, despair. Beyond the question of how tough an environment we come from, and the real hazards of poverty, for instance, the essential difference is that some of us are better at controlling our emotions and don't act them out destructively. Once I stopped condemning the inmates and viewed them with a little more compassion, I was liberated from my projections. The darkness didn't consume me.
The spiritual path of the psychic is to acknowledge our projections so they don't get in our way. It takes mindfulness and courage for us to stop and say, “Hey, wait a minute. I must've gotten hooked by a projection. Let me take a closer look.” Believe me, this changes things a lot. Once we begin to see external reality as a potent mirror reflecting what's going on inside us, we no longer separate the inside from the outside, or “us” from “them.” This is an important lesson for anyone, but for a psychic doing a reading being projection-free is like shooting a picture with the lens wide open, light pouring in.