There are signs a long the way that indicate you may have a special gift, unseen coincidences keep pushing you in the “crazy” mode. Every good, authentic astrologer, palm reader or tarot psychic whom I know can point to a couple experiences which lead them to realize that they were different, that they had an ability to tune into people and receive intuitive insights. For example at an early age you may start seeing spirits or angels. You may not have had names for them, but you saw them and they were there, playing with you. When I was almost five years old I saw my first spiritual beings. I was sick and the medical doctors thought I was dying of double pneumonia. I mumbled to my grandmother that “yellow light friends” were playing with me. My grandmother, a tough woman who had survived the dust bowl and other hard times during the Great Depression, took this as a sure sign that I was dying, that angels had come for my spirit
. The whole family was gathered to cry over my small bed in St. Joseph’s Hospital. I was with my “yellow light friends” up above the bed looking down, on a sight which to this day remains fresh and resilient. There was my mom, my Aunt Helma, Aunt Ruth Ann and Grandmother. They were praying in that way only women in the face of death can pray, with gut and spirit streaming from their core. I recovered, but I had changed. Suddenly I developed opinions in all matters of spirit, correcting my elders when they projected what heaven might be like. My Grandmother told me I was a know it all and “piped up all the time.” Slowly this experience slipped away. I became a normal kid again.
Everyone who has the calling may also get an experience what I call being hammered. Being hammered is a great pain, a pain that is slow to heal. For me it was not nearly dying as a young boy. My hammer was the death of my father when I was seventeen. Children of divorce or a death know a deep pain, a cutting to the heart where reality twists the knife of loss and the dark powers can enter, allowing depression, escapism, compulsion and despair to overwhelm the spirit. My father was a strong man, an electrical engineer, a WWII survivor. Just when I was getting to know him as a man, cancer took him away. The hammer got me good. I learned to cry alone, run wild, drink, chase young coeds, defy authority. My mother begged me to grow up. But I lived in a stupor of avoidance. I read On Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and declared the world insane.
Then I met a woman, the grandmother of a girl friend, who taught me how to read palms and cards. From the first time I met grandmother Harris she told me I had the calling and she was going to teach me. Joan, my girl fiend at the time, told me that grandmother Harris was always looking for the a disciple, since no one in her family seemed willing to learn these skills.
Grandmother Harris had been a member of the Theosophical Society, had both a reading and a medial diagnosis by Edgar Casey, and advocated prayer and meditation for nearly everything. Grandmother’s response to most of life’s trials was, “Lets have a cup of herbal tea.” She was an enthusiastic teacher and I went wild for this knowledge. As a young undergraduate and graduate student, my tarot cards where always in my book bag. I would give reading to a small group of friends. It was a pleasant hobby and it made me feel popular and needed. One of my classmates, Helen, wouldn’t go out on a first date with a young man unless the cards were right. “Why tempt fate?” she’d say.
My second experience with my “yellow light friends” occurred in Nigeria, where I was a teacher in the Peace Corps. West Africa wasn’t called the white man’s grave yard for nothing. During the rainy season I fell ill and ran a tremendous fever of 105. Sweating like a pig and I remember thinking that a high fever wouldn’t be such a bad way to die, better than cancer. The heat just bakes you until you’re done. No pain. No shrinking and shrinking until the body is just a shell like my Dad went through with cancer. Suddenly my consciousness was with my “friends of light.” We were sitting on a rotating ceiling fan right over my bed watching Hersh and David , my Peace Corps buddies, work over my sweating body with large towels that they soaked in a solution of alcohol and water. They kept washing me down trying to reduce the fever. I was pretty sure I was a goner and I felt relieved. I loved my buddies for working so hard on my body. But I was ready to become a light being.
What happened next can only be described as madness. I suddenly woke up on the bed and looked at David and Hersh.. “I’m immortal and I’ve got no time for this,” I shouted. An English major, I always had lots of books around me, even in the middle of upper region of the Benue River. Leaping from the bed I raced to my book shelf, now shouting, “There are the immortal of Siddhartha and the damned of the earth.” I then proceeded to go through all my books tossing them either into an enlightened pile or a damned pile. All the while David and Hersh were trying to get me to bed. Only when every book in my house had been judged enlightened or damned did I submit to going to bed, where I slept for over twenty four hours. The fever had broken. But as Hersh said, “Something happened to your head, man.”
I became obsessed with sex as a union with god through a woman, got heavily in to Tantra and the significance of sexual transcendence. After living by my wits and palmistry skills in Tangier for six months I wrote what my suffering mother called a “dirty” novel about the transformation and damnation of it all. It got published. This nearly ruined me. To be twenty six with a well received novel out can cause serious ego troubles. I quit a secure teaching job to go to Los Angeles, to try to write for the TV and film industry.
Los Angeles taught me humility, for it is a big town with a huge creative community which is competitive beyond belief. I hit this town like a big bug hits a windshield, with a splat. Lots of people were published and had novels out, but never mind that, scripts were in. I had to learn a new form. I was struggling to make it as a writer, each month the rent was an ordeal.
My transition to the psychic life style came through a freelance writing assignment. VIVA Magazine interviewed me to do some freelance work. During this meeting, I told the editor, Kitty, that I could read palms. She immediately wanted a reading. Three weeks later Kitty called me with an assignment to do an article built around a palm reading of Dominique Sanda, a hot European actress. Dominique was staying with a friend, Linda, in a swank house with a long drive way in Belle Aire. I did Dominique’s reading and Linda asked for a reading as well. A week later I received a call from Linda offering to pay me to “perform” at a party.
This is where my call to be a astrologer and palm reader became a reality. One party lead to another. Soon my psychic income was out running my freelance writing income. The Los Angeles market for metaphysical people and ideas is huge. There are more people in L.A. who use metaphysical readers either as party entertainment or personal advisers than any other city in the U.S. Also, at that time, there were psychic fairs everywhere. All this was before the present day famous psychic phone lines advertized on TV. Now the market is flooded.
I look back affectionately on those times in L.A. when I starved as a writer and learned the craft of working with people in the metaphysical arena. Eventually I came to write about the craft of astrology, Astrology and the Games People Play, and palmistry, Romance on Your Hands. These books are still in print, unlike my youthful novel, Mad Dog Press which emerged, danced in the light of the early seventies and then sank without trace. I have written one movie that was produced, Street Soldiers. I am not proud of this film, but is kept me alive. I have written script, Behind the Dolphin’s Smile, a look at how to return captured dolphins back to the sea. This has been optioned. This book seeks to present the underlying dynamic of what it is like being a reader, the process of mind and the spiritual discipline.
Since I have a Master’s Degree in Education from Harvard, my mother finds it hard to understand my life style. What am I doing with all this fancy education? I know the Harvard Alumni Association finds it difficult to understand my life style. The conservative view is that I should make my mark in a “normal” way and not stick out like some kind of soar thumb with this Hocus Pocos reading stuff.. What kind of man spends his life dressing up in a tux, cape and turban and goes to corporate parties and plays the Fortune Teller? Or, what kind of man sits in his study and uses palmistry or astrology to give advice to people? Especially when he is a certified teacher. My answer: it is my calling. I did not choose this, it chose me. Or as my pal Hersh said after my illness in Africa, “Something happened to your head, man.”
The snippets of thoughts in this book will give you, the reader, the pieces of the puzzle necessary to put together your own thoughts about human nature in general, this calling, its clients, ancestors in the tradition and the true tools of the trade. It is a grand calling, an ancient endeavor, full of great minds, wonderful sacrifice and devotion. It is also a calling full of cheats and thieves. But it’s life. As in politics, the ministry, medicine, insurance salesman, to name a few, the problem is the same: buyer beware
The only proof to any spiritual enterprise is in the fruits of the labor. Every great religious and spiritual movement has this common axis: Good spirit brings good deeds. Good Spirit nurtures love. Negative creates negative, positive creates positive. Let me tell you how to read this book. Lay its words upon your heart, see if its truths or ironies brings you to any greater understanding. This book has been written upon the bare rock of my experience. Take what buoys you up. Take what love you find here.