When the psychic told me she would not
allow me to record our session for legal reasons, I should’ve twigged that
something wasn’t right. Put it up to over-credulity, perhaps – I’d like to
think I’m a little wiser now, thirteen years later (I hope to God that I am, at
least a little) – or perhaps to the willing suspension of disbelief that a
certain kind of story requires, and sometimes, deserves. And I’d been in her
chair before, once, one year previous, when I and my friends had found her
while on our vacation; my first time in Sedona, Arizona, and her little house at
the end of town with the glass globes arranged all about the garden outside and
the big sign, says PSYCHIC, and something about it – maybe it was the glass
globes – just appealed to me: the seeker in me, the sucker in me. It was on
that first visit that she’d told me she could teach me to channel, but that the
time wasn’t right, I should come back in a year. Okay, I thought. I don’t
remember much else of the particulars of that first visit, other than the chair
she’d put me into was an assemblage of copper tubes, having a pyramid on top,
and she placed coins and amulets over my arms and wrists, told me that for
health reasons I should drink my own urine, or, as an alternative (which I took
her up on) allow myself to be shuttled over to her colleague’s office for the
most expensive emergency massage I’ve ever had. (One of my two friends I’d come
with, who also had a session with this woman, got exactly the same advice re:
the necessary consumption of bodily waste. I don’t know how she resolved the
issue. My other friend politely declined any services whatever.)*
So when I returned a year later, it was
for the express purposes of learning how to channel. The psychic did not
remember me. She did not tell me to drink my own urine. She put me into the
chair with the pyramid on top and once again balanced coins and amulets onto my
forearms so that I couldn’t move without them falling off me, and as before, I
remember little of the actual session, other than it involved how I would be
able to use sound as a healing technology (which still seems to me like a good
idea), and in the end I was given some practical instruction in how to channel.
It was a very different sort of reading from the one previous, in that there
were no histrionics, no attempt to scare or upsell me, perhaps because the
massage practitioner had by then moved on.
I won’t describe the specifics of the
instruction, other than it involved a manner of meditation, and it was
something that I was eager to start out on. The psychic told me that I should
go to one of the several famed power spots in the area, most of which I was
already familiar with, and spend some time trying the exercises. I decided to
go into nearby Boynton Canyon, as that would involve a decent hike in, and
offer some seclusion as well.
As an aside, it was year or two later,
having dinner with a friend of my now ex-wife’s, a German woman, a no-bullshit character
employed in a medical supervisory post, when she told us the story of how she
had hiked this same canyon several years earlier, alone, just shortly after the
construction of the high-end (and reputedly cursed) resort positioned just at
its mouth. She’d come upon the splayed remains, some distance up a ridge, of a
coyote that had, to all appearances, been ritually sacrificed, and she felt
thereafter, for the remainder of her stay in the region, as if eyes were
following her everywhere she went. In a nearby mountain town some forty miles
away, the people she passed as she strolled along the street all seemed to
watch her knowingly, aware that she’d found their secret. This was a woman not
given to flights of imagination or paranoia, not normally. But then these were
not normal circumstances, at least for her.
Now, for me, later, in the springtime of
1999, sitting on a rock at the terminus of the canyon trail revealed nothing in
particular except a feeling, though it was not one I could easily describe.
Later, with more work with the exercise, this feeling would resolve into
something more specific and pronounced. I would feel myself being flooded by a
peculiar intensity to the back of the inside of my head, the sensation of a
presence of something very big, to which I attached the name IMHOTEP (like
that, in caps), not knowing at first who this represented historically, or
what, mythologically. That I would research and learn more about in time. But at
first, I only had the name and the strange intensity of feeling – though in
this initial attempt, I didn’t even have that much: only a vague sensation, a
hopeful tingle, and also, I found, a vast and lasting anxiety that would carry
me through the whole of the next week.
*Disclaimer: I am sometimes an idiot. If
I have a functioning bullshit filter at all today, it’s because I have
willingly subjected myself to egregious amounts of bullshit in the past. I will
probably also do so in the future. In my defense, I think it’s maybe part and
parcel of being open to the weird that one also accepts, at least for a time,
the stupid. Also, holding a figure such as the above-described professional
psychic up for scrutinous ridicule, or ridiculous scrutiny, is about as
challenging as dynamiting barrels of carp. The point here is less that this woman
would appear to be patently fraudulent, at least 85% so, but that I returned to see her again. I drove
1300 miles plus, not only for that reason, but also for that reason, perhaps on
the basis of that remaining 15%. Also: this does not represent a baby +
bathwater = everything tossed scenario as regards the veracity of psychic-
and/or mediumship as a whole, in my opinion, as I have written in the past, in
admiring terms, of professional p/m Anya Briggs, who is, I believe, among
others of my direct experience, a truly gifted channel and someone whose
integrity proves worthy of my trust. It is a complex issue in which the quality
of information received and the character of the receiver can be very different
and sometimes unrelated things; i.e. the information may be worthwhile and/or
it may be garbage, depending on its invisible source; and/or, the person
receiving may be a clown or a sincere human, or perhaps an entirely sincere
clown, pretending to be human, receiving information that is real or spurious
or combinations of both, etc. Etc.
[Etc.]
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