Second Sight (36 page)

—T
HE
G
OSPEL
A
CCORDING
TO
T
HOMAS

It was a typical busy Saturday, the time I set aside each week for shopping and chores. Already I had been to the car wash and hardware store; now I was browsing for a birthday gift for my father. Main Street in Santa Monica is one of my favorite places. I love the scent of jasmine, lavender, and vanilla wafting from the shops, the smiling faces of people strolling by, the heat of the sun baking my bare shoulders.

As I roamed from store to store engrossed in my search, suddenly, out of the blue, I thought of Barbara, my best girlfriend in grade school. I hadn't seen her in years. We were joined at the hip while growing up, did everything together—she was even with me the night in Seal Beach, right in front of her family's summer home, when I first got kissed by a boy. But at fourteen, as I started using drugs and became a full-fledged hippie, Barbara and I drifted apart. One of the last times we spent together, we took a walk in our neighborhood in Westwood, and—I think just to please me—because I was smoking a cigarette she lit one up, too.

Yet there I was, over twenty years later, not just thinking of her but flooded with images of my friend. Warmed by these memories, my shopping finally complete, I walked over to the Rose Cafe for a snack. As I stepped through the door, scanning the bustling space for a table, I spotted a familiar face. A beautiful woman now, but looking much the same: It was Barbara.

“Judi, is that you?” she exclaimed, calling me by my childhood name. I sat down with her, thrilled, and we began to bring each other up to date. Learning that I was a psychiatrist, Barbara beamed quietly, happy for my success. “And what about you?” I asked. I'd heard she was a photographer. “Well,” she said, pausing for a moment, “our timing is unbelievable…. I'm getting married tomorrow.”

I had to catch my breath. There had been so much love between us as young girls. For our paths to be crossing at such a significant moment sent a chill running through me. Growing up, we'd always been there for each other, present at the milestones of our lives. I hugged Barbara, whispered “Congratulations,” but soon it was time for her to go. As we parted, I knew from the deepest inner authority, that meeting Barbara was no mere accident. It was two old friends again being drawn together, if only for a moment, a merging of past and present; just how the psychic often intervenes in everyday life.

In ancient Celtic mythology, the Isle of Avalon is a mystical place of extraordinary power where the psychic reigns. In
The Mists of Avalon,
Marion Zimmer Bradley tells us, “There was a time when a traveller, if he had the will and knew only a few of the secrets, could send his barge out into the Summer Sea and arrive…at the Holy Isle of Avalon; for at that time the gates between the worlds drifted within the mists, and were open, one to another, as the traveller thought and willed.” According to the myth, because so many people lost faith in the psychic and no longer acknowledged the influence of the Unknown, the mists grew so dense that Avalon became unreachable and lost forever.

In the same way, our own mystical nature has become obscured. It's actually there for each of us; its apparent disappearance is simply an illusion. Like the ancient traveler, we're blinded by the mists of fear, self-centeredness, and lack of faith. We've forsaken the mystery. And even if we were willing to make the effort to retrieve it, where would we look? The good news is, we can stop searching; the psychic is ever-present in our day-to-day lives.

The psychic may touch your life dramatically, though more often in so mundane a fashion that such simplicity may cause you to overlook it. You can write off some instances as chance collisions of people, places, and time. But suppose you alter your focus a bit. Suppose you view such random-seeming occurrences—known as synchronicities—as inspired coincidences, signs that something other than the haphazard is at work. There is magic in doing this, an acknowledgment that a greater force is moving through our lives, linking us all together.

Perhaps you have experienced déjàvu, the sense of having been somewhere or known someone before. There is no logical basis for your feelings, but they are so real you could swear that they're true. At another time you may psychically pick up an event as it is actually happening. This is clairvoyance—different from precognition, which is when you accurately predict an event before it occurs. Finally, if you've ever been labeled “overly sensitive” and seem to take on other people's moods or even feel their physical symptoms, you have encountered psychic empathy—a common yet overlooked expression of prescience.

In our modern world we're moving at such a rapid pace we miss seeing the extraordinary in the little things. But it's right there, between the lines, where the mystery lies, the place where we'll find the key to the parting of the mists.

SYNCHRONICITY

Have you ever experienced perfect timing, a moment when everything just seems to fall into place? For a brief interim, you step out of the random chaos and find that all forces are aligned, with nothing preplanned, and yet all is in order. Events come together with such exactitude that it feels you've been launched onto a preordained course. You can't stop thinking about someone and you run into them on the street; a person you've just met offers you the perfect job; you miss your plane and on the next flight you sit next to someone with whom you fall in love. This is synchronicity, a state of grace.

Once, attending a doctors' staff meeting at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, I met a surgeon named Michael. Immaculately dressed in a three-piece suit, tanned and handsome, he asked me out to lunch. In the Hamburger Hamlet at the edge of the Sunset Strip, we engaged in small talk for a while. He appeared quite straight-laced, speaking about his prestigious country club, golf on the weekends, Wednesday night poker. He was a nice enough guy, but not my type. Except for being physicians, we didn't seem to have much in common.

Usually when a date isn't going well, I try to ease out of it gracefully and as quickly as possible. But this was different. Although my first impulse was to eat fast and then politely leave, I couldn't say exactly why, but I found myself talking about my spiritual beliefs. Then, abruptly, the conversation turned to death—the words just flowed out of my mouth. Whenever this had happened to me in the past, there always turned out to be a good explanation. Thus, even though it felt strange to be conversing this way with someone I knew so little about, I decided to trust it.

Michael, I learned, had never talked in detail about death to anyone before, but on this particular afternoon he couldn't hear enough about my description of an afterlife, how the spirit is eternal, how death is not an end but simply a transition into other dimensions as real as our own lives. For two hours we sat in huge fanbacked wicker chairs in a restaurant that looked like it belonged on
Gilligan's Island
while he listened, transfixed, urging me to continue whenever I slowed down.

Throughout lunch, I kept thinking, This is one of the weirdest dates I've ever had. Not that I was uncomfortable with the subject matter, but there was just something unsettling about the way it was happening. I kept having the urge to change the conversation to something more commonplace: medicine, film, the weather. But the piercing immediacy in Michael's eyes, his hunger to absorb it all even though he claimed no spiritual leanings of his own, were cues that something important was up. Although the reason wasn't clear, it was obvious that Michael badly needed to hear about death.

We finally said our good-byes and walked out to our cars. As I headed west on Melrose toward my office in Century City, I wondered, What just happened? Why did such a profound topic arise with someone I hardly knew? Before I had a chance to come to any conclusions, my beeper went off. I had an emergency admission at the hospital, had to get over there right away. The rest of my afternoon flew by. By the time I finished seeing patients, it was late evening and the lunch conversation had receded into the background, out of my conscious thoughts.

A month later, a friend called to tell me that Michael had been killed in a freak motorcycle accident on the Ventura Freeway. For a moment I was stunned. Michael dead? It seemed impossible. He had his whole life ahead of him. People like Michael get married, have children, lead charmed lives. They aren't supposed to die young.

Images of Michael haunted me the rest of the day. Although we had only met twice, I felt I'd known him a long time. Suddenly the seemingly offbeat direction of our conversation at lunch made sense. There was some unconscious part of Michael that had intuited his impending death, yearned to know everything he could about it. I'd been the messenger.

Michael's early death was tragic. And yet, death is a part of life: It seemed inescapable that there was a certain tightness to my conversation with Michael. I felt privileged to have been witness to such a turning point, glad I hadn't run from it. Neither of us had seen the larger picture, the far-reaching implications of our talk, yet I had sensed that something important was happening. Now it was evident that a synchronous event had positioned Michael and me together at a critical point in his life.

The psychic often intercedes in the most subtle ways. Since I hadn't foreseen Michael's death, I didn't have the option to tell him about it even if I had thought it appropriate. (Nor would such a warning have guaranteed that his death could be prevented.) Being psychic doesn't mean I'm superwoman with the power to alter the future. Or that I know everything about a person at any given point in time. Usually, unless I'm specifically tuning in to someone with a particular question in mind, I receive only what's needed for the moment. I have come to respect that. In Michael's case, I felt consoled, seeing how interrelated we all are, aware that in some small way I could help someone prepare for what was to come.

Fortunately, I'd known enough not to impose my will on our meeting. You may find yourself in a similar position. Remember a time when a situation just didn't seem to fit. Perhaps you felt that a crucial piece of the picture was missing, but you couldn't quite articulate what it was. It could have been a man who looked and acted like an old boyfriend asking you out on a date. Because the similarities were so striking, you decided to accept. Or maybe you ran into a woman you hadn't seen for years. Even though you may not have been close to her, you felt the urge to have a long talk in which something important to you was revealed.

The secret is to go with the mystery. When a situation doesn't make immediate sense, a larger overall message may appear if you let it unfold naturally. This doesn't mean you should place yourself in circumstances that are potentially destructive. You need to stay alert, use your head, know when to walk away. But you must also try not to discount or underestimate the implications of synchronous events. In some instances, the relevance is instantly obvious; in others, as with Michael, it takes time. We have to trust the divine ordering of our lives.

Synchronicities are an expression of our psychic rapport with the world around us. I am thrilled whenever they occur, and I look to them for guidance. Synchronicities delight me, reaffirm that I'm on the right track. Though I believe that everything in life has meaning, synchronicities are a direct acknowledgment of our prescience; they highlight our collective link. Whenever patients come to me wanting to be psychic, I advise them to pay careful attention to and record synchronous events to appreciate how frequent they are. This makes the psychic more real. I've trained myself to notice synchronicities, and I encourage you to do the same. So many can be lost if you aren't specifically watching.

Once when I was driving up Sunset Boulevard to a friend's house in Laurel Canyon, I happened to turn my head and look into the car next to me. Startled, I did a double-take: I was sure the woman at the wheel was a patient of mine, Jane. Though I waved at her, however, she sped right by me without response, and I then realized it wasn't Jane at all, just someone who bore a close resemblance. Such cases of mistaken identity, I've learned, especially if my confusion is so marked, often have special significance and are synchronicities. In this incident, my attention was drawn to Jane, so I knew to tune in to her psychically and find out what was going on. Right away, I sensed her despair. I tried to reach her that night but she wasn't home. The next day, when Jane came in for her scheduled appointment, she was frantic, having just discovered that she'd been fired from a teaching job she loved.

You'll come across signs of synchronicities everywhere. The trick is just to stay aware. The stronger your reaction is to even small clues, the better the chance they are psychically meaningful. Suppose you're driving to the market one afternoon and notice that the license plate on the car in front of you has your brother's name on it. Immediately this grabs your attention. You haven't seen him for a while, wonder how he's been. Twenty minutes later, just as you're loading your groceries into the trunk, he drives up beside you. Or maybe a portrait of a close friend crashes to the floor, its frame shattering. The next day you learn that she'd been in a car accident that very afternoon. Or a particular song keeps going through your mind that reminds you of an old girlfriend—you were crazy about her, haven't heard from her in a year—and when you go to the mailbox, what do you discover? She's written you a letter. The key is to recognize these connections. Go out of your way to emphasize the psychic all around you.

Some synchronous meetings are serendipitous and can be harbingers of good fortune. When you take advantage of these golden moments, your life can change for the better. Such opportunities don't only crop up during important business meetings, extravagant parties, or special events. If you stay on the lookout, they won't slip through your fingers. Synchronicities are enmeshed in the fabric of the ordinary. They can happen to you when you least expect them: in the Laundromat, at the car wash, in line at the bank.