Second Sight (16 page)

That was the last time I saw Anna. Her son called my office the following day to inform me that his mother had died. Anna's death had been a peaceful one, he said. The whole family had been by her side. I hung up the phone and let the news sink in slowly. Anna and I had been working together for over a year. We were close and I would miss her. It was hard for me when anyone I cared for died. I would always be expecting to run into them, to see them smile or hear their voice. I knew that I would feel Anna's absence for a long while. I was sad that she was gone but, at the same time, relieved. Remembering the acceptance on Anna's face as we said good-bye, I realized that I had done the right thing.

For the first time in years, I had acknowledged the validity of my internal voice, had listened to it, and doing so had brought Anna solace. Even though I knew I had taken a huge chance, I felt giddy, almost euphoric: Since I had done it once, the next time would be easier. I couldn't have asked for a more positive affirmation.

On my way home that evening, I rolled down the windows in my car and took in the night. The stars seemed brighter, the air fresher, my hearing more acute. With a cool breeze blowing through my hair, singing along to a Willie Nelson song on the radio, I headed west on Olympic Boulevard toward the beach. As Anna had found peace in her death, so I was finding a new clarity in my life.

Chapter Five

M
ixing
M
edicine

Because science expands one type of knowledge, it need not denigrate another. All great scientists have under stood this.

—M
argaret
M
ead

Goose bumps shot up my arms. I was looking at a full-color picture of a man on the cover of
L. A. Weekly.
I had never seen him before, had never even heard of him. Still, the cells of my body were registering the familiarity. I quickly flipped to the inside story.

His name was Stephan Schwartz, I read, a parapsychologist, founder and director of the Mobius Group, an organization in the Los Feliz area that conducted psychic research. Assisted by a staff of psychics, he had worked in association with police departments, insurance companies, and private individuals to help solve crimes and unearth lost archaeological relics, some of them underwater. I immediately wrote him a letter describing my own experiences and dropped it in the mail. I figured that he would be swamped by responses to the story, so I didn't expect to hear back right away, if at all. But the next week, I received a phone call from Stephan himself. We talked for a few minutes and then arranged to meet at his home.

The moment I saw him, there was instant recognition between us; it was as if we had known each other for years. Immediately I knew Stephan would be a pivotal influence in my life. As we spoke, he reminded me of a blue-blooded New Englander who could have stepped straight out of a country club in Connecticut. I fell in love with his preppy looks, his intelligence, and his full-spectrum ability to blend with scientists as well as psychics. It soon became obvious that Stephan's deep-seated belief in spirituality made him one of those rare people who gracefully straddle many different worlds simultaneously.

I told Stephan that my abilities had been dormant for a long time, but it didn't seem to matter to him at all. He said the rebirth of images triggered at Brugh Joy's conference a few months earlier would be further quickened by my meditation practice. The next step for me was to put them to practical use by participating in what he called a “remote-viewing experiment.” He agreed to teach me this technique, used to visualize past, present, and future events about which the viewer had no previous knowledge. He said that by going into a meditative state, and having an interviewer specifically guide me, I could be trained to engage my psychic abilities consciously. Stephan was about to take over where Thelma Moss had left off. He enlisted me to join his staff of psychic respondents. I jumped at the chance, and he put me to work.

The remote-viewing experiments were done as a team effort: A composite of the viewers' independent responses was analyzed for areas of concurrence. Stephan had selected this group on the basis that each individual psychic had a specialty in which he or she was most proficient, typically related to their careers. The central core of respondents consisted of Jack, an engineer; Hella, a fine arts photographer; Andre, a musician; Ben, a film producer and documentarian; Alan, a parapsychologist; John, a newspaper photographer; and Rosalyn, an educator and healer. Stephan felt that I would bring to their work a piece that had been missing.

I continued to conduct a busy private practice during the day. Then, after office hours a few evenings a month, I would take part in remote-viewing experiments at Mobius as an outlet for my psychic expression. In the past, I'd always felt that I needed to sacrifice one part of myself for the sake of the other. There had never been enough space inside of me to include both. Although initially I was careful to maintain a separation between these two major aspects of my life, I had begun a new phase, fully active in both the medical and the psychic worlds.

One day, at the end of a stiflingly hot Thursday afternoon, Stephan called me in for a remote viewing. It was one of those suffocating Indian summer days in Los Angeles when people lie listlessly by their swimming pools trying to steal some precious oxygen from the air. On my way to the Mobius offices, I was in my car, windows rolled down, inching through the rush-hour traffic, heading for Los Feliz. Perspiration dripped down my neck; I was wiped out from having seen clients back to back since nine
A.M.
The cool softness of my bed was the only vision I felt capable of having.

I usually felt like this at the close of a long day's work when I was heading to the Mobius offices. My life had become so demanding. My beeper would go off at all hours of the day or night. Most of the time I was drained from making hospital rounds, battling with insurance companies, and answering panic calls from patients and their families. There were constant emergencies and little space for anything else. These evenings were the only times I set aside for myself. The whole trip, from office to office, took about fifty minutes. As much as I might feel like turning back, no matter how burned out or irritable I might be, by the time I pulled onto Hyperion Avenue and parked my car, most of my energy would be back. I knew this, and it kept me going. I also knew I needed to be at Mobius more than I needed sleep.

I pulled my car into the lot. I looked gratefully at the modest two-story fifties-style building. Slowly, I felt my stomach releasing, my jaw letting go, my mind clearing. For much of my life, when I tried so diligently to squash my visions, ever-present and hammering to get through, I felt imprisoned in a tiny little box. Working as a psychic at Mobius, the walls of that box began to soften and then melt away. Suddenly I'd find myself in a reality so huge that the boundaries disappeared and I knew that anything was possible. It was there I was privy to a myriad of images, sensations, and sounds outside the realms of my ordinary perceptions. It was there I could drop the claustrophobic persona of “psychiatrist,” a role that seemed too small to fit who I was anymore. It was there I could release all defining and confining concepts of self and become something more.

And then there was Stephan. On Mullholland Drive late one night after dinner while we were watching the city lights sparkle and entice, I told him one of my dreams. Already I trusted him enough to risk it. For me, dreams are the most personal part of myself that I can share. Immediately he clicked in, following what I recounted, beat by beat, reading aspects of it that I couldn't see myself. Stephan has the uncanny ability to travel those realms with me and I with him. Since then we've sustained a friendship that has remained easy, smooth, and strong.

The evening of the remote viewing, Stephan greeted me as I walked through the door to his office. I watched him with amusement, phone plastered to his right ear, papers piled high on his desk, his computer screen wildly flashing. There he was, business as usual, trying to do several things at the same time. His life was a three-ring circus, and he was a master juggler. When I had first met him in his office, I had an intuitive vision of Stephan, encircled by books and manuscripts, which were strewn all over the floor. He was fully clothed, taking a shower in the middle of his living room. But instead of water, pure white light was pouring out of the faucet. He was worried that his papers would become wet and damaged, but I assured him that in the light they would be safe.

Stephan hung up the phone, looked at me, and smiled. The remote viewings always took place in this office, a small conference room looking out onto a lush, beautifully planted garden. The only wall hanging was a five-foot-square framed map of Alexandria, Egypt, where precious artifacts had been located through the psychic work of the Mobius Group in 1980, five years before. Adjacent to the map were floor-to-ceiling shelves filled with books spanning the hard sciences, parapsychology, and the arts. One section was devoted entirely to translations of sacred religious poetry and prose. The pile of papers on Stephan's desk were letters from the farthest reaches of the world, people looking for validation of their psychic experiences. Apparently disorganized but impeccably thorough, Stephan would eventually answer each one of them personally.

As we began, Stephan told me that tonight we were doing an experiment to locate possible shipwrecks, but, in order not to bias me, gave no further details. He then shut off the phones and informed the other staff members that we weren't to be disturbed. I had grown familiar with our routine, having participated in a number of other remote viewings. On the basis of past performance, I had been selected as a respondent for this project. After Stephan and I took our usual places in comfortable chairs at opposite sides of the table, he placed in front of me an audiotape player to record the session, pencils and pens, a blank 8 ½ by-11-inch piece of drawing paper, and four different nautical charts.

Once we were settled, I closed my eyes and quieted myself. Silence filled the room, and the heat and various stresses of the day dropped away as I started to slip into a meditative state. I emptied my mind of all thoughts. The traditional mind had no role there. No more analyzing. Complete receptivity. Nonthinking. I sought the Zen-Buddhist state of becoming an empty rice bowl so the Universe could fill it. I was that rice bowl. I was empty. I was ready. I heard a sound, a voice from far away. It was Stephan's. He instructed me to turn the unmarked chart right-side-up and begin to indicate the various locations of sunken ships. He asked me to focus particularly on a missing sixteenth-century Spanish galleon. Besides the location of the wrecks, I was to tell him what the sites looked like in terms of any geographical markers, and to explain what would be found there.

As I perused the charts and drifted into a light trance, I watched to see where my hand was drawn. Nothing. I waited. I was patient, knowing that impressions don't always come right away. Still nothing. A minute passed, maybe two. I couldn't judge time. Then my body seemed to come alive. I became more alert, aware, open. Not focusing on images or thinking at all, I began to buzz with feelings: My hand was a direction finder. As I glided it over the map, some areas felt hotter than others; there was a tingling, a heightened intensity, a palpable swirling sensation like millions of atoms vibrating in sync. A burst of invigorating heat rushed through the entire length of my body as my hand continued to scan the chart. I felt like I'd been plugged into an electrical socket; I broke out in a sweat. My hand was magnetized, pulled to specific spots. I was merging with the land and water in an unconscious communion with them.

“This area is very rich, high energy,” I said. “My hand is burning up.”

“What does it look like?” Stephan asked.

“These are land masses.” I pointed to a place on the chart. “There's a high frequency, like a sound wave, going up and down the land masses.”

With Stephan's encouragement, I watched, slightly detached, while my hand, still tingling with heat, marked circles on the chart around three one-mile-square areas.

“Keep going, Judith,” Stephan said. “Draw a picture of whatever objects you think might be found there.”

I had no idea whether or not my drawings would make sense or simply be an incoherent mass of scribbles. I was just a witness to these circular motions and long, sweeping lines connecting themselves together at their own pace. Watching the blank paper, I saw my hand begin to sketch first an anchor, then a cross-shaped medallion, and then some medicine vials.

When these images were completed, the motion in my hand stopped. I knew not to force it. I'd learned it was pointless to draw what my mind thought should be there rather than allowing myself to be guided. Setting down my pencil accordingly, I stopped. For the remainder of the session Stephan asked me more detailed questions about the location of the ships and their contents. After about an hour we finished, and Stephan coded the chart and the tape of the session with the date and my name, then filed them.

As Stephan subsequently explained, we had started the first stage of the
Seaview
project. A local businessman had approached him with a proposition: Along with traditional magnetometer readings—which measured metallic content—and aerial surveys, he wanted Mobius to utilize remote viewing to scan a 1,500-kilometer stretch of the Great Bahama Bank for lost ships and buried treasure. Stephan was interested but knew that the cost of such an undertaking could be prohibitive. Through sheer determination, Stephan and some associates had raised over $1 million to subsidize the project. This was practically unheard of, since in the past parapsychology as a field was notoriously underfunded. But Stephan was able to pull things off that seemed close to impossible; he was unquestionably a pioneer.

In August 1985, after extensive historical research, our staff defined an area where there was some likelihood of finding Caribbean shipwrecks. Stephan then obtained a license from the Bahamian government to conduct a search in that vicinity. Subsequently, he compiled charts of the designated locales and gave them to me and the eleven other psychic respondents, interviewing us individually numerous times over the two-year period we were involved in the project. To prevent bias, we agreed as usual not to discuss our sessions or anything else about the experiment with one another.