Brazellica

As I drove home from the hypnotist’s office, I felt that it was too soon for me to say. I went over the main events in my mind – finding myself in a Berlin hotel room, sitting outside the office of the superior officer to whom I was supposed to report, leaving quickly, discarding the uniform, going through some hilly terrain to reach a small town outside of Germany. Watching the local shopkeeper die of stab wounds; the closest thing I had in that town to a friend. Seeing the wreckage of a German plane in a tree as a sign that the war was ending. Sitting alone in my small room, laboring to breathe after being kicked by a horse. My body giving up its ghost – me – and me, as that ghost, confused by what had happened. Wandering in the woods for a few weeks and then, still lonely, still sad, joining a group of souls that had likewise avoided committing evil, but with whom I otherwise felt little affinity.

I had wanted a vivid experience – one that would leave no doubt in my mind that our souls survive bodily death. I had wanted to smell things, to know things, to feel details so sharp that I could not question the notion that I had experienced them myself. I hoped for an experience that would feel like an actual memory – one that would make me say, “Oh, yeah – I remember that. I did that.”

This experience was not like that. Instead it left me disturbed. When the hypnotist asked me to look at my feet and tell him what I saw, my first reaction was not “Oh, yeah,” but “Noooo…”

I had not expected to see myself in the SS. Far from it. I grew up in the U.S., and the war coverage I had seen was always told from the American side. I had not yet seen the movie “Das Boot,” which looks at the war from the perspective of a German U-boat; thus, I had never watched a movie or read a book that evoked sympathy for the Germans. Now I was seeing myself as a Nazi. And not just a Nazi, but a low-level member of its military elite. Seeing those boots on my feet was genuinely chilling; if the hypnotist had not gently prodded me to accept what I saw and let it unfold, I might have come out of the hypnosis right then.

So the hypnosis had not given me the satisfaction I sought – it had not shown me a life as a brilliant artist, a great lover or a beneficent king. It had shown me a life in which I was a member of one of the cruelest organizations in human history.

Not a hero, not vivid

Moreover, I couldn’t see myself as a hero at any point. Certainly I was glad to see myself abandon the service and its uniform, but I also knew, both during the session and afterward, that I had done nothing to prevent the organization’s great crimes. All I had done was to choose not to participate myself. A good move, to be sure – but hardly one to brag about. For I knew what was happening – I knew the mission – and I did not seek to thwart it. Again, had the hypnotic session been the fulfillment of a wish, I would have expected to see myself display a more active heroism.

And I had been lonely the entire time. I saw no evidence of romantic love in my past life, or even unromantic sex. There may have been some of each, but if so, it must not have been terribly significant.

So – the experience was not as vivid as I hoped it would be. I did not smell any smells, did not feel certain that the scenes in my imagination were actual memories. Nonetheless, because the scenes fulfilled no fantasies of luxury or heroism, or even romantic love, I found it more credible than I otherwise might have.

In addition, the way the ‘life’ unfolded, under the hypnotist’s guidance, was interesting. It had not moved the way a dream moves. The sequence of scenes made sense – events followed logically from what had come before – and there were no bizarre figures or inexplicable backdrops such as we find in dreams. The ordinariness of the images gave them gravity, the way a black-and-white movie can seem somehow more real than a well-lit, full-color extravaganza.

Other elements made sense, too. For as long as I can remember, I have been suspicious of large groups. Religious organizations, political parties, fraternities, even sports teams make me a little leery. Possibly, that stems from a life in which I saw the darkest side of group cohesion.

In addition, I have no fantasies of being the boss. I’ve always thought it was because I don’t want the responsibility. Now it occurred to me that there might be another reason: Maybe I don’t want the visibility, either. Maybe I had already seen the potential benefits of keeping a low profile – it’s easier to walk away unnoticed. Maybe I want to be able to cut and run with little trouble, in case the organization becomes poisonous.

I was not born Jewish in this life, but was raised by a mother who believes that the Jews are God’s chosen people. Jewish people have played large and benevolent roles in my life, from my father’s boss to childhood friends to friends and roommates in college and beyond. And some part of me may have generalized what I learned as a defecting SS member – I was raised to despise prejudice, and that lesson has stuck even as other lessons have faded.

I had also been given more educational opportunities than most people. A wealthy great-uncle had paid for me to go to a boarding school for high school. I knew that most people received no such opportunity, and felt some guilt for it; it didn’t seem fair.

Now I wondered – was I given this family and education in part as a reward for the character I showed last time out?

Hard to say.

Of course, it was also possible that my brain had produced this story to fit my background. Maybe, in the guilt I felt about those educational opportunities, my unconscious had created a persona that could explain them: I had been assigned an evil job in a previous life, and because I had refused it, the life I have now is something I can appreciate without guilt. And the affinity I feel for Jewish people, and my resistance to groups like fraternities – these things, too, can be explained. And the loneliness that I felt in my life – this was not new. And my concave chest: Rather than the product of a simple, meaningless birth defect, perhaps it was the result of a decades-ago kick from a horse.

The horse thing seemed particularly far-fetched.

Didn’t feel dream-like

Nonetheless, the images remained. As the story did not unfold like a dream, it also did not fade the way dreams often do. I could still see myself bent in that chair, alone in a small room in a country bordering Germany, laboring to breathe. I could see myself waiting outside the office of a superior officer who’d never seen my face, and never would. And I could wonder what had happened to his soul, if this was the next step for mine. Where did the souls of those who carried out the Final Solution go, if earthly death is not so final?

I did not know. I did not know anything. With little prompting, my brain had generated a coherent, sensible story about myself in a previous existence on Earth – a story that seemed a fit precursor to the life I was actually leading. That story had not reproduced stories I had heard as a child, and had not been the fulfillment of a wish that I see myself as a powerful or famous person.

I looked forward to talking about the experience with Whitney, the woman I was seeing at the time.

I had met Whitney during my drive west. Stopping off in Kentucky to surprise an old friend of mine, I ended up in a Lexington bar with a few of his friends.

Two women walked past us to reach a table 20 feet away. One of them looked terrific, and I decided I had nothing to lose by approaching her. I was just travelling through, after all; if she rejected me, I wouldn’t have to face her again. Nor would I need to see most of the people who would know that she had turned me down. Travel is a liberating thing.

So I walked over to their table, saying, “Excuse me, I’m just passing through this town, and I’m conducting a survey. I was wondering if you guys would mind telling me whether or not you believe in reincarnation.”

The woman I didn’t want looked at me with revulsion, as if I had cheerfully offered to vomit on their table. Whitney, though, smiled warmly, saying, “Well, I don’t know, but I’m open to the possibility.”

As it turned out, she was open to another sort of possibility, too. We had a lovely conversation, and when I got to New Mexico I sent her a postcard, thinking I’d never see her again. When she got it, though, she called, and told me that she had some frequent flier miles saved up; would I like a visitor anytime soon?

By the time I went to the hypnotist we had been dating for maybe ten months. Unlike the woman I had left behind in Boston, Whitney was easy for me to get along with. We hardly ever fought. Mostly we had sweet conversations each night, and her job enabled her to visit every month and a half or so.

Our history of sweet conversations, combined with her interest in my talk about New Age topics like reincarnation, made me think that she would enjoy hearing about my trip to the hypnotist. I had been wanting to go for so long, after all, and had finally gotten the money to do so by guessing the number of pennies in the jar; she had certainly enjoyed hearing about that.

Save the money?

When I told her about the trip, though, she did not sound pleased. I couldn’t understand why not. Did she think I was crazy? Did she disapprove of my possible Nazi past? I imagined all the reasons I might react badly to such a story, and tried them out on her as possibilities, but none were correct.

“I guess I just -” she began. “I guess that I – well, this may sound selfish, but – well, Bill, you saved up that money, and I can’t help but think that you might have used it toward a plane ticket to come and visit me.”

“Really?” I said. “That’s what’s bothering you?”

“Well, yeah. I mean, I’ve been telling myself for so long that you’re just starting out there, and your rent was expensive for a while, and now you’re doing a little better, but I keep coming out there and I don’t ask much from you, Bill, I really don’t. And it was easier for me to tell myself that you just can’t afford to visit me, and that you would if you could — but then when you go and spend $50 on hypnosis and past lives — I mean, I know it’s important to you and all that, Bill, but I just wish — I just wish you might have saved that money toward a trip out here.”

I was hurt, and I reacted defensively. I told her again about the pennies, and how I thought I was supposed to use that money for past-life exploration – that was what I had told my higher self, or whatever, I would do with it, and I felt that I had to live up to that.

I tried to reassure her that I really did want to visit her, but I felt angry that she had not appreciated the importance of the experience I had just had. She was the first person I had told about it, and I had counted on her to talk me through it for a little while, and now instead we were talking about her frustration that I hadn’t spent the money on her.

The truth was, I had never even considered using that money to visit her. I meant that money to go toward spiritual exploration – that was the whole reason I had moved to New Mexico – and as beautiful as Whitney was, the idea of spending that money on a plane ticket to Kentucky had never even crossed my mind.

And now, of course, I wanted to visit her even less.

I didn’t know anyone else with whom I could talk about my experience, so I kept quiet for a time.

Originally published by The Guy Code, July 13, 2001. 

As I drove toward the hypnotherapist’s office to look for a past life, I wondered if I was a ridiculous figure.

I imagined that some people would think that, if they knew what I was doing. Some might consider the trip a simple waste of money, but others would see it as a sign of a deeper problem. The priests and nuns who had trained me might take my experiment as a personal insult – or a sign that, despite their best efforts, I was bound for Hell. My mom would fear the same things.

Some people might laugh at me, I figured, as they still laughed at Shirley MacLaine. And I hadn’t even done anything yet.

My onetime shrink had been puzzled, a year earlier, when I told him I was moving to New Mexico and was looking into New Age things.

A reasonable question

“What is it that you are looking for?” he asked, with a tone suggesting that there was simply no need for people to look into things like that. He had told me that he was an atheist. I guess he figured if atheism was good enough for him, it ought to be good enough for everyone – or, at least, everyone who’d spent as much time with him as I had.

Well, it was a reasonable question: What was I looking for? I hadn’t been able to explain it to him then, and maybe I still couldn’t. I guessed that I was looking for a sign that there might be some purpose to all the crap that happens in this world. After I had seen my strong father disappear into death, and understood that I would follow him someday soon, along with everyone I would ever know and all of the people I would never know, I wanted to figure out whether our existences had a point. All the striving, all the pain, all the loneliness – the injustice, the humiliation, the drudgery – for what?

What bothered me more than any of these things in themselves was the idea that they all might happen for no purpose whatsoever. As long as that possibility hung in front of me, so did the possibility that it was not worthwhile to live at all. The Greeks had come to such a conclusion, apparently – one said famously that it was better not to be born at all, but if one was born, then it was better to die young.

I could see why he had said that. In front of me I saw possibilities for pleasure – there was sex, of course, and good jokes and food, and sometimes love. But I saw many more possibilities for pain – including bad sex and rejected love and lousy food, and also car accidents, nuclear wars, nagging spouses, mid-career layoffs, loneliness, cancer, heart problems. If you escaped all those, your reward might just be Alzheimer’s.

So I guess what I was looking for, Doc, was a defense against the death wish. If I could believe that human suffering had meaning, then maybe I’d be able to avoid killing myself. If I could not believe it, then maybe, someday, I’d check out early to avoid the rush.

And I wanted to experience this meaning for myself. Books were helpful, but contradictory, and it’s hard to know whether you can trust an author. The pennies incident was pretty cool, too, but not as conclusive as I hoped hypnosis might be. I wanted to see events, smell things, interact with people from a previous existence in a way that was so solid that it would leave me certain, beyond any doubt, that the life of the spirit was real.

“You feel yourself relaxing,” said the hypnotherapist, as I sat back in his office easy chair for the second time. “You feel your eyelids grow heavy, in a comfortable way. You know that you are in a safe place, and you feel the warmth of the room. You find yourself slipping deeper and deeper into relaxation.”

Like my shrink, the hypnotherapist had asked me what I was looking for. But this guy’s tone was different. He was an adult who thought it was probable that I had existed before my current body was born, and that exploring that time period might be worthwhile.

Looking back

I told him I was specifically wondering what, if anything, I might have been doing during World War II.

My reading about reincarnation had shown me that many children spontaneously express interest in a particular time period at around the age when they begin talking and learning to read. Like many kids, I went through a dinosaur phase, but I wasn’t in this guy’s office to imagine life as a Tyrannosaurus rex. For me, the next phase after dinosaurs was the Second World War.

In an era of books like “The Greatest Generation” and movies like “Saving Private Ryan,” it’s hard to remember that there was a time, during the mid-1970s, when the Second War to End All Wars was not nearly so popular. America had just gotten out of Vietnam, and the memories of our troubles there were enough to stifle most moviemakers’ machismo.

Consequently, my strong interest in World War II did not feel like the result of a trend. As a young boy in upstate New York, I found myself riveted by movies like “Tobruk” that showed up on Saturday afternoon TV. Without parental or other encouragement, I drew pictures of scenes from that movie and others. I built models of German dive bombers, and came back from the library with books like “From Pearl Harbor to Okinawa.” I could sit and read for hours about the progress of this long-ago war. Mostly I read about the conflict in the Pacific – the Bataan Death March, the Battle of Midway, the pillboxes on Iwo Jima.

I told the hypnotherapist I was also curious to learn if there was a past-life link to the shape of my chest. When I was born my chest was concave. A surgeon corrected the indentation, more or less, by bending the bone when I was five. The literature on past lives suggests that some conditions – birthmarks, allergies, phobias – have roots in a previous existence, so I figured ‘why not?’

The man agreed to help me look for those things. He suggested that I let myself sink deeper and deeper into the chair, and that I gradually relax each part of my body, secure in the knowledge that I was safe. The knowledge that I was taping the session helped me to relax, too; it took away the fear that he would make me forget important things.

He suggested that I rise in my mind to a nice, comfortable place, where I could feel very secure. There, I could ask to be taken to a significant past life.

“What do you see?

Now he asked me to imagine that I was floating back down toward the Earth, where I would find myself in a life that had some connection to World War II. Down I floated in my imagination, as he counted down from 10, telling me that each number would take me closer to that life, 9, and now I was heading down into that life, 8, a life from World War II, 7, where I would feel safe as I explored what happened long ago, 6, and now I was even closer, 5, and I would be able to see what I needed to see, 4, and hear what I needed to hear, 3, and I was deeply, deeply relaxed, 2, and I was almost there, and 1: I was there.

“Look down at your feet. What do you see?” he asked.

In my mind’s eye I looked down. “I can’t see anything,” I said, and I wondered if this exploration was going to work.

“Keep looking,” he said. “Your vision should be improving, as you get used to where you are. Look around you – where are you?”

“I’m in a small room,” I said, and it felt right: I could see the walls, close in around me.

“What sort of a room?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s not clear.”

“Look again at your feet.”

I did, and I saw something. “Noooo,” I said.

“What do you see?” he asked.

“No, this can’t be,” I said. “I don’t believe it.”

“Don’t resist what you see. The conscious mind will try to fight what comes up, but there is plenty of time for you to analyze what you see later. For now, you can simply relax and tell me what you see.”

“I just don’t think -“

“What is it that you see? You can tell me. It’s all right.”

“Black leather boots,” I said. “I’m wearing black leather boots.” Warm as the room was, I felt my insides chill.

“All right,” he said. “Why are you wearing black leather boots?”

“Because I’m in the SS.”

“You are in the SS,” he said.

“Yes,” I said. “That seems to be right. I’m in the SS. But I can’t believe it.”

“Don’t worry for now about whether you believe it. Tell me what is happening right now, in your life as a member of the SS. Why are you in that small room? Where is it?”

“I’m in Berlin,” I said. “I’m in a small hotel room. I have been sent here – a special mission. To kill Jews.”

“A special mission to kill Jews,” said the hypnotherapist. “And what is happening in your life right now, as you stand in the hotel room?”

“I’m nervous,” I said. “People are marching in the streets. They are very excited.” But I was not from the city. I felt that I didn’t know what I was doing there.

“Where did you grow up?”

“I’m from a small village.” The answers flowed from me without effort, as I tried to remain relaxed in his easy chair in Albuquerque in the 1990s. New Age music played in the room.

“Is your family still in the village?”

“They’re dead,” I said. “My mother and father have died.”

“Do you have any brothers or sisters?”

“No,” I said. “I’m alone.”

“Why did you join the SS?”

I could feel the answer as if it was something I did a few years ago, when I was younger and less secure: “I wanted to feel proud of myself,” I said. “I did not have much to be proud of, and the men in the SS – people are proud of them, admire them. I wanted to be admired, too.”

“How do you feel about that decision now, as you stand in the hotel room?”

“I’m confused,” I said. “I don’t think it’s right to kill Jews. I don’t think I want to do it. But I’m alone and I feel confused.”

“Go to the time when you decide what you will do,” he said. “Go there – now!” He snapped his fingers. “Where are you?”

“I’m outside an office. Inside the office is the man I’m supposed to report to.” I felt that I was sitting on a bench, and I could see one of those old-fashioned three-blade desk fans. Sunlight came through a venetian blind and reflected off the white wall. It was the type of office a private eye might have in a Humphrey Bogart movie.

“What do you do next?” the hypnotherapist asked.

“I haven’t decided,” I said.

“Go to the time where you make your decision,” he said. “Go there – now!” He snapped his fingers again. “What happens?”

I saw myself leaving, without ever checking in with my new commanding officer. “I left,” I said.

“You left?” the hypnotherapist asked. “Where are you? Where do you go next?”

“I’m not sure where I’m going,” I said. “But I got rid of the uniform pretty quick.”

“Are you afraid of getting caught?”

Yes, I say, “but there are so many people milling around, and they weren’t sure when to expect me.” I sensed that I had a little time to get away, but not much – I had to be quick. It helped that I didn’t have a high position — my tardiness was less likely to be noticed, and my face was less likely to be recognized.

The scenery indicated that I was moving out of the city, toward the mountains. At no time did I feel that I was being chased. In addition to being unimportant, I had not deserted openly, in a manner that might inspire others. There was no need for my superiors to hunt me down and make an example of me.

“Where do you go?”

“I get through the mountains somehow. It doesn’t seem to have been too hard. I get a room in a small town, in a country bordering Germany.” The hypnotherapist asked me to identify it, but I could not. “Maybe Switzerland,” I said, but I wasn’t sure. I was able to communicate with people there, but not well. For the most part, I avoided people anyway.

“Go forward in time to the next significant event in this life,” he said. “Go there – now!” Snap. “What’s happening?”

I could see a man lying on his back, bleeding. “He’s dying,” I said.

“Who’s dying?” asked the hypnotherapist.

“My friend, the shopkeeper,” I said. “Well, he wasn’t really my friend. We didn’t talk much, or spend any real time together. But he was kind to me – he was the closest thing I had in this town to a friend, and now he’s dying and I feel terrible.”

“Why is he dying?”

“A petty thief,” I said. “A guy came in to rob the store, and he stabbed my friend. That’s it, he’s dying, and I’m sorry that he’s going.”

“Okay, well, keep in mind that this all happened in the past, and it’s okay. Now go forward to the next significant event. What do you see?”

“There’s a plane in the tree. A plane crashed into a tree near the town.” I could see that it was a German plane. The pilot had been killed. I was cut off from the news; this plane crash was all I had, and I was guessing at what it meant. To me, the crash signaled that the war was ending – that Germany was losing. I had mixed feelings about this. Mostly I felt numb.

“What else happens in this life that is worth looking at?”

“Nothing really,” I said. “I just live out my life quietly in this small town. I keep to myself, and no one bothers me.”

“Now I’d like you to move forward to the day of your death, the day that you died in this life, this life when you were in the SS. Remember that you are safe as this happens; you are merely reliving something that happened long ago. Tell me what you see and feel.”

“I’m in a chair,” I said. “I’m alone in my apartment in a chair. I can’t breathe too well. Something’s wrong with my breathing.”

“What’s wrong with it?” he asked.

“A horse kicked me,” I said. “I got kicked in the chest by a horse. It crushed something. I’m just sitting here, trying to breathe. But I can’t breathe too well at all.” I could feel the difficulty.

“Now go to the moment when you stop breathing, when your body stops breathing and your spirit comes out of it. What happens? Tell me.”

“I’m looking at my body; it’s just sitting there in that chair. I’m confused.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know where to go.”

“Where do you go?”

“I wander in the woods for a little while, maybe a few weeks. I don’t know what to do, what’s happening with me.”

“Then what? Where do you go then?”

“I feel that I am going into the sky, to be with other souls. They are not relatives – I don’t know them. But there is a circle of them and I sense that I’m in the right place.”

“Why is that? What makes this the right place?”

“It’s hard to explain. But I feel that I am with people who could have done evil, but chose not to. We don’t know each other, but we have this in common. We didn’t prevent evil, but we didn’t commit it, either. I join them.” There was no glory to this rising; I felt tired, and the darkness and loneliness of that life were still with me as I joined the circle.

“Okay,” he said. “That’s enough. Now you can come back to Earth again in your current body, just as you are today – here in Albuquerque, in the present time. You will remember what you need to remember, and will be able to feel more peaceful about your current life, knowing where you came from.”

And he counted back from 10 once again, and as he did so I let myself feel my body more and more, and then it was done and I could open my eyes.

We talked for a bit. I wrote the man a check and headed out to my car.

I felt very strange as I drove home.

Originally published by The Guy Code, June 14, 2001. 

Attracted as much by its spiritual quirkiness as by its geographical otherness, I had moved to New Mexico, whose license plates describe it as the “Land of Enchantment.”

The plates don’t lie. As you drive West on Route 40, the red clay and odd hills that stretch out away from the road tell you you’re not in Texas anymore. You might be on Mars. Nor do the state’s friendly residents dispel that notion. Native Americans live in pueblo towns. White nuclear physicists practice their arts — it was here that the first atomic bomb exploded, causing a young blind girl traveling with her parents to ask what that flash of light had been. New Age spiritual seekers explore. Immigrants from Old Mexico find this state warmer, in more ways than one, than some others in the union. Retirees and artists and drifters come here to settle, attracted by the sunshine and the skiing and the clarity of the air.

D.H. Lawrence had been to ashrams in India and monasteries in Tibet, but he said that the place that really cut through his Judeo-Christian shell to reveal his soul’s core was Taos, New Mexico. That was good enough for me.

In Albuquerque, where I figured I’d be able to find a job, you can also find hypnotists in the yellow pages offering ‘past-life regression.’ (As it turns out, many if not most hypnotists offer this sort of work, but depending on the city in which they operate, they may not mention that fact in the ad; you have to ask them.)

In a hurry to put a roof over my head, I agreed to pay more rent for a one-bedroom than I really ought to have paid. Moreover, the electricity costs were staggering. I was working as a temp at a bank, and then as a mental health worker in a psychiatric hospital, and my income was failing to keep pace with expenses.

After months of this — working all the overtime I could, yet falling behind each month, failing to make a dent in the credit-card debt I had incurred with the drive west – I felt frustrated. I had come here, in part, to explore spiritual things, to see for myself if there was any real value behind the books I was reading. And yet I could not afford to pay a hypnotist, even once.

Pennies in a jar

One day I saw a sign on the door of the First National Bank in Albuquerque: “Guess how many pennies are in the jar – Win a $100 savings bond!” I went in to check it out.

The jar was sitting on a ledge in front of the tellers, so that if you went to see a teller you had to walk past it. They wanted a lot of entrants. A sign explaining the contest said that the person whose guess came the closest would win the bond. In the event of a tie, the winner would be selected by etc., etc.

I stood near the display, trying to figure out a good way to reckon the number of pennies. It looked like a mess. The pennies piled on top of each other at all angles, twisting and jumbled. Wanting a figure – any number – I counted a certain number of pennies up the side, and another number of pennies across the diameter at the top, and then, unable to remember how to calculate volume, I estimated the number of pennies across the bottom, too. And there was a bend in the jar – it widened as it went up, and then it narrowed again. I attached a number to the distance across the widest point, too. By now I knew my system made no sense, but I saw no other way. I multiplied the estimates, coming up with a figure somewhat higher than 20,000.

I wrote this number down on a sheet of paper and moved away from the jar, feeling helpless. Even if I could remember the way to calculate the volume of a cylinder, this was not a true cylinder. Standing forty feet away now, filling out my deposit slip, I continued to stare at the jar.

I had just been reading a different book by Linda Goodman, the perky astrologer. This one was called “Linda Goodman’s Star Signs.” It didn’t say too much about astrology, but got into all sorts of other esoterica – numerology, Nikola Tesla, eating purple food if you wanted to gain weight, and green if you wanted to lose it.

The book was strange, but I didn’t mind. The author seemed both kind and smart. So I remembered favorably a section I had just read, in which she had spoken of a ‘higher self.’

Ask my ‘self’ a question

She said that we all have a higher self, and that self knows many things that we do not. It’s attuned to a higher frequency, or something. In any event, she said that if we wanted to know something, all we had to do was ask our higher self for the answer.

I decided to try it. “Okay, higher self,” I said within my head, not moving my lips or making a sound. “If you’re really there, please help me out. I’d like to know how many pennies are in that jar.” I paused, and thought about my circumstances. I was eating rice and soup for dinner most nights, then, and bringing peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches to work. I fantasized about eating a nice dinner at the Olive Garden someday, but I knew it would be months before I could afford to do that. So it meant a great deal to me when I said, “If you tell me how many pennies there are, I promise I will not use the money from the savings bond to eat a good meal. I will use it to get hypnotized, so I can search for past lives, in the interest of spiritual understanding.”

Numbers appeared to me, not before my eyes but behind them, the way words may appear to us before we speak them. I wrote them down one by one: 3, 6, 8, 7.

I wrote the figure “3,687” on an entry form, added my name and phone number, and handed it in, along with the one containing the number that was somewhat higher than 20,000. Then I left the bank, feeling somewhat odd.

After I had done this, I decided not to think about it. That seemed the right course of action, somehow.

You’ve won!

One weekday morning two and a half weeks later, the phone woke me at around 10 am. I had worked the evening shift until 11:30 pm the night before and hung out with friends afterward, so I was groggy when I picked it up. I figured it was the mental health center, calling to tell me they were short-staffed and could I please come in.

The woman’s voice was unfamiliar. “Hi, this is Gloria, from First National,” she said, or words to that effect. “I’m calling about the contest – the pennies in the jar. You won! In fact, not only did you win – you got the number exactly right!”

“Oh, is that right?” I said, less enthusiastically than I might have. I tried to sound alert for her.

“Yes! When can you come in to pick up your prize?”

“Um, I guess I can come in today. Is that okay for you guys?”

“Absolutely! That will be great. Just come in and ask for me – my name’s Gloria,” she said, and I wrote it down so I wouldn’t forget.

As the water in the shower helped wake me up, her words started to hit me a little more: I had gotten the number exactly right. I wondered briefly if there really might have been more than 20,000 pennies in that jar.

I drove a mile or so to the bank, and asked for Gloria. I was shown to a desk along a side wall.

Gloria told me that the number of pennies had been exactly 3,687.

“It’s amazing that you got it right – to the penny,” she said. “The next closest guess was off by around a hundred, but it certainly didn’t end in ‘87’ or anything like that. That was really great!” She smiled, and went away to get a form for me to sign.

Then two other women walked up. One spoke, while the other looked on. The speaker was a thin, sweatered woman with curly gray hair; she may have been in her mid-sixties. The other one I don’t remember too well; she hung back.

“So you’re the winner,” the speaker said.

“Apparently so,” I said, with an embarrassed smile.

“That’s wonderful. And apparently you got the number exactly right.” She was smiling, too, but her tone sounded suspicious.

“Yes,” I said.

“How did you do that?” she asked.

I smiled again, in what I hoped was a disarming manner, and told the truth: “Well, I was reading an interesting book, and it said that we all have a higher self, and we should ask it for things we want. So when I was here in the bank, I asked my higher self how many pennies were in the jar, and I saw some numbers and wrote them down.”

“Really?” she said – sounding as though she was, at some level, disturbed.

I nodded. Her conservative dress and manner made it look as though she might have been working in this bank for a long time. It seemed to me that she would have been more comfortable if I had told her, “Well, ma’am, I cheated. I know the guy who put the pennies in the jar, and he told me.” That answer would fit her view of what was possible in the world.

Gloria returned with the form, I signed it, and she handed me the bond. I thanked her and smiled. She smiled brightly back – she wasn’t suspicious – and I felt that I could go.

Just a number

As I walked out I felt self-conscious and strange. One or two other bank employees looked at me, and I imagined that they might have heard that I had gotten the number exactly right. I wasn’t sure, of course. But I wanted to get out of there as soon as possible.

When I went home I wrote about the event in my journal, wondering what it meant. Otherwise I wouldn’t be able to tell you the actual number; I’m more of a word guy. But that was it: 3,687. More than 16,000 pennies fewer than my estimate. As I said, I’ve never been much for numbers.

Now that I had the bond, I could afford one session of hypnosis. But what if it didn’t work?

From my reading, I learned that some people do not hypnotize well. Knowing my own nature, I could imagine myself resisting the suggestions of the hypnotist – trying to stay “in control” – and wasting the entire session as a result. Then the bond would be wasted, too.

Raymond Moody, the man who coined the phrase “near-death experience,” also looked into past-life regression at one point. He had been reluctant to do so, he said, but when a friend offered to hypnotize him to look for his own past lives, he accepted, and was amazed at the “lives” he generated. His book “Coming Back” details his skepticism – he does not say that these experiences are real past lives, but suggests that they might be creations of our unconscious. Nonetheless, he says, they are fascinating, and who knows – perhaps some of them are real, after all.

At the end of “Coming Back,” Moody includes a script that the reader can use to find out what hypnosis feels like, and to explore past lives in a comfortable way. I decided to make a recording of myself reading the script, as he suggested, and then to listen to it in the privacy of my apartment, in order to see what hypnosis might feel like.

It felt pretty good, as it turned out. It’s like that feeling you get when you’re about to fall asleep, but you don’t quite. Most nights, when we’re in that state, we just keep drifting until we’re asleep, and then the next morning we don’t remember how nice it felt. But if the phone rings when we’re in that state, or a noise startles us, we know the pleasant feeling we have just lost.

So hypnosis felt like that, more or less, once I got used to the sound of my own recorded voice suggesting that I ought to relax. When my voice on the tape asked me to safely experience any past-life imagery that might come up, I imagined some things that looked unusual, but nothing too definitive.

Around that time, some guy knocked on my apartment door to try to sell me a coupon book that he said was a great deal. “The free oil changes more than pay for the book,” he said. “And then you’ve got all these other things, too.” When I looked through the book, I saw that what he said made sense. Plus, there was an offer for a free session of hypnosis. For $25, that book seemed like a damn good deal.

So I bought it, and called the hypnotherapist on the coupon to ask if he helped people look for past lives. He said that he did. He also said that he wouldn’t work on those during the free session. That session was really intended just to show people what hypnosis felt like, and then if they wanted to work on particular issues after that – smoking, weight loss, and so on – then they could do so during a paying session.

I didn’t mind that so much; I had the savings bond.

I went in for my free session, and found the man pleasant and non-threatening. I lay back in his office’s easy chair, and when he suggested that I relax, I did.

Afterward I wasn’t sure I had really been hypnotized – it didn’t feel as though much of anything had happened – but he assured me that my eyes had fluttered in a REM-like way. So, sure enough, I could be hypnotized.

Next time, I would look for more.

Originally published by The Guy Code, May 31, 2001.

Okay, so Sascha had opened me up to the possibility that a psychic could see my future better than I could. And first Marvin, then Linda Goodman, showed me that there was more to astrology than I had thought.

But if there is a purpose to our lives – if we are more than just random accidents – then what the hell is it?

The single fact of life that had made atheism comfortable was the inherent injustice of life on earth. No amount of exposure to wild-eyed optimists, Catholic programming or the “all men are created equal” clause of Jefferson’s Declaration could ever convince me that life here is fair.

A quick glance around shows us that the race is not always to the swift, and the money and pretty girls are not always to the good. That’s just the way it is. Children are born into such different circumstances and have to cope with such different bodies and events – not even an omniscient God would be able to show me the fairness of sending some people to Heaven, the rest to Hell, based on one shot at existence. Especially not when some kids check out at 4 – well before the “age of reason” declared by theologians, and free of responsibility for any wrongdoing – while the rest of us get enough time to seal our damnation.

Why did I think this life was a one-shot deal? Well, that’s how I was trained. We Catholics muddled through, and when blatantly unfair things happened – real, searing tragedies – we’d read the book of Job, and talk about God moving in mysterious ways.

Run, Baby, Run

As a kid I read Christian comic books like “Run, Baby, Run,” the autobiography of Nicky Cruz, and shivered in fear. Cruz led a brutal New York City gang called the Mau Maus, and one of his best friends was stabbed to death while still in the gang. What chilled me about the death of Cruz’s friend was not so much the way Cruz described the air leaving the young man’s lungs for the last time – “like a tire deflating,” Cruz said – but what that deflation signified: That man’s soul was going to Hell. Had Cruz died that day instead of his friend, it would have been Cruz’s soul in perdition. Through sheer chance, though – or what some Christians call “God’s grace” – Nicky lived long enough to meet and be saved by a kind preacher named David Wilkerson.

Wilkerson, whose own autobiography – “The Cross and the Switchblade” – would also become a popular comic book, had left his home in the suburbs to minister to the tough kids on the streets of New York. His was an act of great kindness, and it undoubtedly saved a great many kids from the fate of Cruz’s friend. Underlying Wilkerson’s urgency was the belief that this life is the only chance any of us have: If he didn’t manage to reach these kids within a few short years, they’d spend eternity with the devil.

This belief led Wilkerson to take great risks, as it had led countless Christian missionaries to take similar risks in parts of Africa, China and the South Seas. Some cultural historians would take the argument even further: They’d say that the belief that we have but one life to live has been the engine driving all of Western Civilization – the spur that led Europeans to create wealth while Hindus felt no rush.

I was taught that the missionaries were right: All people needed to convert to Christianity, and specifically to my family’s brand of Christianity – Catholicism. Those who resisted would go to Hell forever. It’s hard for some non-Christians to imagine this, but at some level many of the persecutors of the Spanish Inquisition felt that they were performing an act of kindness. Torture in this life, by their view, is nothing compared to the eternal tortures of the damned.

I heard about the missionaries, and gave them money along with my classmates, but all I could think of were the pagans who never met one. What about the generations of Chinese who lived and died for millennia before a preacher made it to their shores? The aborigines, confronted with strange white men who looked upset about something they could not communicate? What about the Jews who had the message pounded into them but still held out, wanting to preserve the religion of their parents – an impulse we Christians applauded when the religion to be preserved was the “right” religion, but scorned when someone’s parents had the “wrong” faith?

More to the point: How did we come to believe that God would create all these souls, only to discard most of them just because a few lazy, incompetent or bullying preachers gave Him bad PR?

An even more subversive question: Why do we expect the same Deity who created this brutal mess of a planet to suddenly become kind to Christians, giving us all of what we wanted, just because we died and are now in a different part of His Universe? Life is chock-full of suffering here, even for Christians who spend all of their lives with other believers. Why should the afterlife be so much easier? What did we ever do to deserve a blissful eternity? And if you want to say ‘We didn’t do it, Jesus redeemed us,’ then why can’t you feel the redemption now?

Ah, when you try to harmonize the idea of a just God with the miserable lives around you, the questions never stop…

Unless, that is, we get more than one shot.

Second chances?

Marvin told me that it looked as though we might. He said that astrologers tend to see one’s particular human existence is merely the latest in a long line of vehicles for that same soul.

Perhaps because of my training, that explanation seemed a little weird to me. It seemed to give God a little too much slack, and I didn’t want to do that because I was still angry at Him for various things.

It seemed to me that the doctrine of reincarnation asked people to imagine that there is justice, without ever actually showing it to them: “Don’t like the way your life’s going? That’s okay, I’ll convince you that you used to be a tyrant, so the pain you’re feeling now is just exactly what you deserve. There – now do you feel better?”

My family background is Irish, so I’m familiar with the hollow boast “We’re descended from kings.” If you go back far enough in most people’s lineage, you can find royal blood somewhere, even if your great-great-great-etc. was just the king of a garbage dump. I don’t begrudge people who take comfort in it – a royal pedigree may be the only consolation you have if the English are treading on you – but it never did much for me personally.

And I had heard the standup comedians: “Have you ever noticed that when people look for past lives, every single one of them spent time as Cleopatra? I mean, I knew she got around, but still…”

I hadn’t actually heard anyone talk about their own past lives, but I laughed with everyone at jokes about Shirley MacLaine. Grasping after a significant past seemed a likely motive for fantasies about a previous existence.

So far, my whole approach had rested on logic: Did this idea make sense? Because I started from the idea that it did not, I naturally enough found logical supports for my position, just as those who thought the Earth was flat found plenty of support for that idea.

More evidence than I had imagined

What I didn’t know about reincarnation was that there was evidence for it. Not “proof,” mind you – but more evidence than I had ever imagined.

Marvin lent me a book by Christopher Bache called “Lifecycles: Reincarnation and the Web of Life.” Bache had a Ph.D in theology, studied at Notre Dame; he used language I could relate to. More to the point, he told stories I’d never heard before – and he said there were many more like them.

He opened with the story of a young girl who grew up near Des Moines, Iowa. As soon as she was old enough to talk, she began insisting that she used to be someone else. She told her parents and others that her name used to be Joe Williams, and she lived in St. Louis. As Joe Williams, she had had a wife and three daughters. As Joe, she had been killed in a motorcycle accident two to three years before being born as a little girl. She said that Joe’s death had left his mother devastated, and she wanted to go see her “other mother” in order to comfort her.

The girl had never been outside Des Moines, and had no relatives in St. Louis. Her father and mother had no interest in reincarnation, and tried to discourage her from telling these stories. But the girl kept asking them to let her visit her other mother, and eventually word of her stories got out. A reincarnation researcher – who knew there even was such a job? – got wind of it, and showed up to interview the little girl.

He wrote down everything the little girl said about her life as Joe Williams, and did what he could to rule out other sources from which she could have gotten the story – relatives, friends of the family, TV, books. Finally, he convinced her parents to make the trip to St. Louis to see what they could find out.

The little girl had given an address at which her mom lived, but it turned out that there was no Mrs. Williams at that address. The phone book listed a woman with the correct first name, so they went to that address, instead. The little girl said it would be a small brick house, and that they would not be able to enter by the front door. She said that her other mother’s right leg was hurt. She also insisted on bringing a bouquet of blue flowers with which to greet the woman.

When they got to the house, which was small and made of brick, there was a sign on the front door asking all visitors to please use the rear entrance. This they did. An older woman came to the door. She said that, yes, she was Mrs. Williams, but she was on her way to the doctor and would they please come back in an hour or so. The researcher agreed that they would. The little girl from Des Moines began to cry softly when she saw this woman. And the woman’s right leg was wrapped up.

When the older woman came back from the doctor’s, she invited the visitors in. Yes, she said, she had indeed lost a son named Joe in a motorcycle accident some ten years earlier. The little girl walked up to a picture of a man, a woman, and three little girls. After identifying the man as Joe, the little girl correctly named Joe’s wife and all three of his children. The old woman was amazed. The little girl gave the woman the bouquet of blue flowers. “Why, the last thing Joe gave me before his accident was blue flowers,” the woman said.

The woman said that she had moved since her son’s death. Before the move, she had indeed lived at the address originally given by the little girl.

The researcher established as thoroughly as he could that there was no relation, whether by blood or otherwise, between the two families. The little girl spent the afternoon doting on the older woman, bringing her drinks of water and so on, far more comfortable than she usually was when she was meeting a new adult.

At some point it was time to leave, and the girl comforted the older woman as best she could. She seemed to think that she had accomplished her goal. Her family brought her back to Iowa, and subsequent interviews showed that she no longer dwelt on the story of Joe Williams. Instead, she seemed to be adjusting quite well to her life as a little girl in Des Moines.

More research

I found the story fascinating. I appreciated the care taken by the researcher to eliminate possible connections between the young girl and the older Mrs. Williams —making sure there were no relatives, friends, television stories or other sources from which she could have learned of this family. Moreover, her parents did not believe in reincarnation, and far from encouraging the girl’s stories, had actively tried to discourage her from talking about this ‘other life.’

The little girl was not an adult looking to understand the meaning of life; nor did she seem to want evidence of a previous existence to compensate for unhappiness in this one. The little girl did not remain in contact with the older woman after the meeting, and the older woman had no money that the girl or her family might want to inherit. I could see no motive for the little girl’s stories beyond the one she gave: a desire to comfort an older woman who had suffered a painful loss.

I had never heard a story quite like it. But it turned out that there were many more.

Dr. Ian Stevenson, who had been the chairman of the psychiatry department at the University of Virginia and is now psychiatry professor emeritus, has been collecting stories just like that one for decades. During the 1960s, the Journal of the American Medical Association gave a favorable review to Stevenson’s book “Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation.” And Stevenson’s work continued, focusing on the spontaneous memories of children who seemed to have no connection to the families they cited as their previous homes.

Having learned about enough of those cases, I felt safer dipping into the other kind: the reports given by hypnotized adults. I read “Coming Back” by Raymond Moody, the man who added the phrase “near-death experience to the English language. I appreciated Moody’s skepticism, as I would later appreciate the initial skepticism of Dr. Brian Weiss, author of “Many Lives, Many Masters.” I enjoyed the approach of University of Toronto professor Joel Whitton in “Life Between Life.” These writers were not fools, and I felt that I could trust them.

And I needed to trust them, even more than I needed to trust Ian Stevenson, because hypnotism offers many pitfalls. Children and adults can be convinced that they have seen things they could not possibly see. Nonetheless, hypnotism also holds out tremendous possibilities.

Maybe I could get hypnotized and find a few past lives of my own, I thought — lives that would feel so real that I would know I had lived them. Then I would finally know that I would not die — and that my father had not really died, and my brother and sisters and mother and grandmother and uncles and aunts and best friends and even worst enemies would also not really die.

I had read enough, it seemed to me. It was time to get some personal experience.

Originally published by The Guy Code, May 15, 2001. 

Using only the date, location, and exact time of my birth, Marvin said a great deal about me. And the computer printout from which he was working certainly looked more scientific than the wet clumps of coffee grounds from which Sascha gleaned his insights. Maybe there was something to this oft-ridiculed field, after all.

My relatives spent a lot of money on the education that made me skeptical, though, and I didn’t want to give it all up for a trick. It was true that Marvin knew even less about me when he said his piece than Sascha had – Sascha, after all, could have talked with his nephew about me, whereas Marvin had no apparent ties to the particulars of my life. Who knew, though – he could have made a few sly inquiries. He’s a journalist, after all. It would have been fairly easy for him to find my resume. With that in hand, he could have called a few folks and guessed the rest.

As with Sascha, though, I could see no motive for subterfuge. For one thing, neither of them charged me a dime. They asked only for my attention, and had been generous with their time. I supposed it was possible they wanted to convince me and others that they had special powers, simply to gain more respect, but they seemed sincere. The likeliest explanation seemed to be the simplest: They thought I was a decent person, and they enjoyed exercising their unusual skills for me, the way I might enjoy telling them a long story.

Astrology seemed a little more testable than coffee grounds. I figured the ability to read coffee grounds might be a non-transferable gift, like 20/10 vision. Anyone, though, could learn to read a computer printout.

Buying the future?

Marvin gave me the phone number of the San Diego company that printed my star chart for him. One day I called the company and requested a catalogue. Among the items offered was a “solar return” for various months in one’s life. That looked promising.

I called the company and requested such a “solar return” for three months that I had already lived through, six years earlier: June, July and November of 1984.

June of that year was the last truly peaceful month of my life, in the sense that it was the last month in which death seemed unreal. In early July, my father drowned and my sisters nearly went down with him. By November, the shock of losing my dad had worn clean through, and a blanket of deep, gray depression covered most of my life.

If there was anything to astrology at all, a reading for my life during these months should show some serious contrasts.

As I waited for the solar return to arrive in the mail, I felt unusually paranoid. I wondered if the company might look up my name on some database somewhere, in order to figure out what these months meant to me.

Inwardly I already began to feel the rage I knew I would feel in full if I were to learn that the company had, indeed, done this sort of spying in order to dupe me. “How dare they toy with people’s emotions in this way,” I got ready to say, “just to get us to believe in their foolish system and pay for other so-called ‘analyses.’”

I needn’t have worried. The ‘solar return,’ whatever it was, bore no correlation whatever to my life during the designated months. Various days in June, 1984, it said, provided good opportunities for me to indulge my hedonistic side. Likewise on the days before, during and after my father died, and likewise again in November. There was no discernible difference between the months. I hid the analysis under some old papers, ashamed of myself for paying $12, plus hope and anxiety, for such a worthless thing.

I didn’t want to talk about astrology for a little while after that. I tested it and it failed. I went on with my life, working at a bookstore near Harvard Square, dating a woman I’d met through a classified ad, wondering about the meaning of life and pain as I walked home from the store late in the evenings through the tree-lined, overly serious law school campus. Eating chocolate-chip cookies, drinking herbal tea, I quietly said to those gray stone buildings and the students and faculty they housed, “Don’t you see – none of your ambition will matter in the end. All that you make yourself into – all of it will rot and turn to dust.” As far as I could tell, no one heard me. That’s how quiet I was.

Silence broken

Then one sunny afternoon, one of my housemates almost asked a woman out to dinner. He really liked her, and had been building up to this for weeks. Now the two of them were laughing together as they walked to lunch, and he was just about to pop the question when she mentioned a boyfriend.

Crushed, he left work early. I happened to be home that afternoon, and I calmed him down as best I could. I told him it was no reflection on him that she’d started seeing someone before she met him. But he had built a scenario in his mind, one that had shown him that they were right for each other. The loss of that illusion hurt him deeply. Before the month was out he moved back home to Ohio.

He left behind a tattered blue paperback called “Linda Goodman’s Sun Signs” by Linda Goodman. One day I noticed it lying on the kitchen counter, and picked it up. The author, depicted in a black-and-white photo on the back, was cute. I had never heard of her or the book, but its publisher claimed “Over 4,000,000 copies in print.” That seemed like a lot.

Goodman’s style was fluid, confident and warm. Her descriptions of stubborn Tauruses and flighty Geminis were gentle teases. I read my own sign’s description, grunted a few times, and decided that it was too general to mean anything. But her writing flowed so easily that I found myself idly reading the descriptions of other signs, too, the way you might watch a river go by just for the motion of the water, without expecting to see anything unusual.

Then I read the description of the Scorpio man: “No matter how his emotions are stirred, you’ll rarely see them reflected on Scorpio’s frozen, immobile face. These people proudly and consciously practice a blank expression. They command their features to remain firm, and their features obey. … [But] just behind his frosty reserve is a huge pot of boiling steam that bubbles and seethes continually.”

That was my father. I had never understood him, and rarely tried to describe him. But Linda Goodman had described him to a ‘T’ – all by describing the twelfth of the calendar during which he had been born.

I found out my mother’s sign – Aquarius – and flipped to that section. Again I was struck. The detachment, the egalitarian ability to find the mailman as fascinating as the President of the United States, the curiosity – all those things were integral to my mom. And the inability to follow directions: “She can’t stick to the recipe when she bakes one of her angel food cakes anymore than she can park the car exactly where you tell her to. There’s some kind of snag in her thinking that causes her to believe just a little twist will improve anything. There’s a constant urge to experiment with a different way to make the coffee, fill her pen, fasten her ice skates and cross the street.”

That was my mom. When I was a young boy she got excited about spinach pie, even though no one in the house really liked spinach. She made ten different kinds of spinach pie. I was the only one who tried each one. Whether I liked a particular variety or not didn’t matter, though – I was never to see the same one again. She later took the same approach to rice pudding.

Her three sisters grew up in the same Irish-Catholic house, but each of them is more conventional than my mom will ever be. Could some of the difference have to do with their birthdays?

I had tried to understand my parents using conventional psychological means. My father was just 17 when he lost his father to a sudden heart attack, and I had wondered if that loss could explain his seriousness. Yet I lost him when I was 16, and my loss has not made me into his clone. I knew a fair amount about the turmoil in which my mother had grown up. That history began to seem irrelevant, though, when I read Goodman’s description of Aquarius.

Still skeptical

A description that seems overly general when it’s applied to you can seem very specific when it’s applied to someone else. By and by it occurred to me that most people probably do with astrology what I had done – read the description of their own sign, and decide that some of it applies and some of it doesn’t. Satisfied that it’s a mishmash, they move on, without ever studying the signs of people other than themselves.

We think we know ourselves well enough to judge whether a particular description applies to us. But do we? It’s much easier for most of us, still, to see the speck of dust in our neighbor’s eye than the two-by-four in our own.

I started to read the book more seriously, comparing the descriptions to the lives of people I knew. Again and again it rang true.

It got better. I met people whose mannerisms reminded me of relatives or close friends. I knew the sign of the relative, but not of this new acquaintance. Using the commutative principle, I figured this new person’s sign might be the same as the sign of the person I knew.

“Are you a Virgo?” I would ask. The look on their face was a thrill: “Why, yes, I am,” they would say. “How did you know?”

“I didn’t,” I would say, and I’d smile. I wasn’t just playing a cocktail game – I was learning about a form of order I had never expected. Our personalities were not random at all.

Of course, nothing makes you look foolish more quickly than trying to guess a stranger’s sign – and missing. And my guesses were not always accurate. The look on my new acquaintances’ faces, when I was wrong, was nearly enough to stop me altogether. “But you seemed so bright,” it seemed to say.

But the guesses were accurate far more often than they should have been, given the 12-to-1 odds. And sometimes they didn’t feel like guesses at all. A person’s manner would seem so similar to a cousin of mine, say, that I would feel certain. And I’d be right. After a while, I stopped trying to guess. I had satisfied my curiosity. I saw that if I really wanted to get good at guessing signs, I could.

I came to believe that solar returns are of little help, but their failure does not negate the entire field. The predictive aspects of astrology still elude me. But the characterological stuff – that stuff works.

Shopping in the scorn department

Becoming a believer meant visiting a part of the bookstore on which I had long looked with scorn. Hiding the covers of the astrology books I was flipping through, I struck the same pose that I had taken as a teenage boy looking for pictures of naked women. Just as I had been doing then, I was studying a truth of which society officially disapproved.

It was in one of those bookstore sections, in Albuquerque, that I opened a book written for women – a book on how to find and seduce a man with a compatible sign. It’s often interesting to learn how women look at mating. More to the point, though, I wanted to see what advice this author would give to a female Pisces about male Tauruses.

You see, Judy is a Pisces. Even though we had been apart for years, and I had moved two thousand miles away and had dated two women seriously since then, I couldn’t quite get her out of my mind.

And that’s what the book said. More to the point, it said, “When the Taurus man meets the Pisces woman, he thinks she’s a dream come true. It works well for her, too, at first. Gradually, though, his temper hurts her more delicate sensibilities, and she swims away. And now the trouble begins, because he can’t let her go.”

“Avoid at all costs,” it warned the Pisces female.

Reading it, all those miles and years and partners away from Judy, I felt terrible. What I had seen as the love of my life was reduced to a few lines in a book – a few lines that made me look, well, bad.

As with the coffee grounds, so with astrology: The loss of Judy had opened my stubborn eyes.

Originally published by The Guy Code, May 3, 2001. 

So Judy went back to her ex-boyfriend, and anxiety stayed with me. But in addition to the loneliness and hurt of losing her, and the challenge of constructing a life after college, I also felt a new curiosity. Sascha had been able to say things about me that he shouldn’t have been able to see. How could that be?

I was happy to get an internship at the Harvard News Office that summer. The place functions as a public-relations liaison between the faculty and the outside world, and also puts out a weekly newspaper chronicling the university’s events from a point-of-view that is generally friendly to the administration. It also served as a liaison for me, between life as a student and life in the so-called real world. My job was to make sure that the files we had on each faculty member were up to date. That way, when a professor died, our office could disseminate a pretty good obituary.

While walking through the office one day, I overheard a bright, friendly reporter named Marvin talking to a co-worker about astrology. The tone of the conversation made it clear that Marvin, who had graduated from Harvard in the same class as Al Gore, took the stars very seriously.

My experience with Sascha led me to pay more attention to their words than I might otherwise have done. Still, I was still struggling to maintain my scientific skepticism. I had studied under Stephen Jay Gould and E.O. Wilson, for heaven’s sake, and had shared a cup of tea with B.F. Skinner. So I challenged Marvin, playfully: “C’mon, Marvin – you don’t really believe in astrology, do you?”

He looked at me sideways. “Do you know what you’re talking about?” he asked.

“Sure,” I said. “That stuff in the newspapers – the idea that our lives are controlled by the stars and planets and stuff.”

“Good. I’m glad you know what you’re talking about,” he said sternly. He turned his back to me and walked away.

What he was talking about

“Hey, wait a minute, Marvin – hold on,” I said, smiling, walking after him. “It’s just that you’re a smart guy, so I didn’t think – no offense, you understand. But what is it – is there really more to it than what I said?”

“You’d better believe it,” he said.

“Really?” I said. “Because I didn’t used to believe in any of these sorts of things, but I had my coffee grounds read a couple of months ago, and now I don’t know what I don’t believe in anymore.”

“Well, why don’t you tell me when and where you were born, and we’ll see what we can say,” he said.

I knew when and where I was born, but not to the degree of precision Marvin wanted. He said he needed to know my time of birth to the minute. His desire for that much detail intrigued me, but also seemed a little silly.

Nonetheless, Sascha, the coffee-grounds reader, had expressed a belief in astrology, too. He had seemed to know his stuff. If I wanted a true test, here was my chance.

I sent a few dollars to the records office of the state of New York, along with a request for my birth certificate. A few weeks later I was able to tell Marvin that I’d been born at 3:13 in the afternoon. And a few days after that, I went to his apartment to hear what he had been able to make of that information.

Marvin had met me just a few weeks earlier, and he knew me hardly at all. Nonetheless, he was able to speak to me about myself for two or three hours — much longer than Sascha had — in great detail.

Who I am — written on my chart

As I took notes, he told me what sort of women I probably liked (the kind that seem nice at first but then show a surprising turbulence – a pattern to which anyone who knows me well can attest, and one I may well be provoking somehow). He described the sort of career toward which I might be drawn (one focused on communication). He elucidated the kind of relationship I might have had with my father (troubled) and might still have with my mother (deeply confused). He said that a certain amount of luck would follow me, giving me friends and a roof over my head wherever I went, but he warned me against taking that luck for granted.

Sascha had focused on politics when he looked at my coffee grounds, making no mention of writing. The omission had disappointed me. I had little interest in politics, but if that’s what he saw, I thought I might have to give up the whole idea of writing. A psychologist I had seen before I met Sascha had wanted me to give up writing, too.

Marvin, though, used a different measure – the way the planets were arrayed at the minute of my birth. Although he and I had discussed neither writing nor books, he said he saw writing all over my chart. “If anyone is here to write, you are,” he said, in a sentence that meant so much to me that I wrote it down immediately.

What was funny to me then, and still seems a little odd, was the evidence: “Your rising sign is Virgo, a sign of service that is ruled by the planet Mercury. Mercury was the messenger of the gods. You may want to serve people by communicating information to them. Because your moon and Neptune are in Scorpio, in the third house – a house that is also ruled by Mercurian principles – your communication is very powerful. You are sometimes very direct; you tend not to be interested in cocktail banter. Some people may like this about you, and some may not.

“Moreover, you probably remember nearly everything,” he said. “And it seems likely that you rehearse the tapes of what you’ve seen and felt, watching them over and over, obsessively, like a detective.”

That sounded about right. I seem to remember more about old family events, for example, than my siblings do. Once, as we drove through Ireland two years ago, I recognized a song on the radio as an old favorite of my little brother’s. That didn’t seem so unusual, except that he could barely remember it. When I said, “Hey, Col – this was your favorite part,” my sister and mother laughed. Colin said he could see that he might once have liked a part like that, but the actual memory of doing so escaped him.

Even now I can see him in my mind’s eye, as we stood in the back of our house’s TV room, where he played the 45 of Cliff Richard’s “We Don’t Talk Anymore” over and over. That’s where we were when he pointed out his favorite part of the song.

It’s years later now, and his tastes have changed. It may be simply that it’s hard for him to imagine liking such a song.

You know the tune – “It’s so funny, how we don’t talk anymore,” and so on. Come on, don’t tell me you don’t remember it, either . . .

I can remember my parents laughing while they potty-trained me, a fact that even a psychotherapist I once knew didn’t believe. “Did they wait until you were twelve?” he asked. Yeah, he was a real validator, that one.

Anyway, Marvin was addressing things about me that seemed to add up to a unique and accurate picture — things to which I had not really given much thought, but now that he mentioned them, yes, I did have that characteristic.

He never even bothered with the textbook generalizations, such as, “You’re a Taurus, so you like food and sex.” That was the sort of line that had made me look down my long nose at the whole field. After all, I reasoned, what human doesn’t like such things?

After a few hours of Marvin’s analysis, my head was spinning in a way reminiscent of the way I felt when Sascha put down the coffee cup.

“Marvin, what does all this mean?” I asked. “How can you say all these things, without really knowing me?”

He explained that from his perspective, the planets didn’t rule us at all. Instead, he said, they served as a kind of big clock. “You don’t have to look at a clock,” he said. “But it keeps ticking anyway. And if you want to know what time it is, in your life, astrology can tell you that. It can let you know — you’ll be dealing with this sort of issue right about now. And then you can make up your own mind how you want to handle it. If you want to ignore the issue and hope it goes away, that’s up to you – but I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it.”

Looking at the odd squiggles from which he had been working, I felt wonder, and a sense that my connection to the world around me might be deeper and more far-reaching than I had ever imagined.

Originally published by The Guy Code, April 19, 2001. 

So my stereo works now, and I appreciate that in the same way I appreciate my health when I have just gotten over a cold – that is, I’m sure I’ll be taking it for granted by next week. And I just finished the third book in the Harry Potter series, and it rocked, even if it was a bit dismissive of the ability to see the future. And Brooklyn may not yet feel quite like Spring, but we can smell Winter’s fear; we know that it’s only a matter of time before the blustery cold fades like the storm over a Clinton pardon.

But when I got back to Harvard that Easter Sunday night eleven years ago I was shaken. Surrounded by scientists and liberal artists who had moved, like me, past religious practice in favor of a vague tolerance, I did not know what to do with my anxiety. To be sure, a large number of my classmates still practiced the religion of their birth, and others had converted into something more intense. But I had generally avoided such folks, and had made no attempt to connect to the Catholic community there. Now I felt alone.

I was sure that my friends would disparage my experience with Sascha the way I had disparaged Dean’s. Who, then, could comfort me about the sense of private unhappiness that I now feared would follow me throughout my life? Was anyone powerful enough to undo it, or convince me it would not happen? On the other hand, if I were truly destined for some level of fame or influence, was that influence inextricably linked to the private unhappiness — so that to tamper with the unhappiness would be to jeopardize the influence, and to jeopardize the influence would be to undermine God’s plan?

The previous day, I had disbelieved in God entirely. Now it seemed that He might exist, after all — and that His happiness and my own might be diametrically opposed. Years of programming by nuns and monks clicked on again, making me feel guilty both for wanting to improve on my fortune and for having it told in the first place.

Her cheating heart?

Before I could reach any conclusions about my soul, though, I had to figure out what to do about Judy. Sascha had said that she would “go out with somebody else, in two units of time – and she won’t tell you, but you will know.”

If I told her about this prediction, would my telling her make it more likely to come true? Or, if I didn’t tell her, would my insecurity lead her to look elsewhere for love? Did it make any difference whether I told her or not?

I could not answer these questions. I was ignorant of fate’s rules.

When I saw Judy that night, we hugged. After we had talked for a bit she tilted her head to the side and looked at me. “You look like you’re in a strange mood,” she said.

Then I felt certain that holding the story back would create a strained distance between us. I didn’t want that. More than ever, in fact, I wanted to feel close. I told her everything.

She soothed me as well as she could. “Why worry about such things?” she asked. “Either they will happen or they won’t.” She seemed more concerned about my worrying than about the predictions themselves.

She did not say the one thing I wanted her to say: “I have no intention of going out with anyone else.” But after my panic, touching her and sleeping with her felt so good that I did not dwell on that missing piece.

For the next several days I felt a form of paranoia that was new to me, as I wondered about the implications of what Sascha had said. I felt exposed to the eyes of beings whose intentions were neither particularly good nor particularly bad. In my conception of them, they had plenty of things to occupy their time — it was not as if they were fixated on my life. But if they wanted to, they could check it out, just as they could check out the lives of the people around me.

Someone watching me

I had not felt watched in that way for many years. And before, when I had felt it, I imagined the watchers as devils and angels. Sascha seemed to be neither.

I didn’t know about the future, but at the very least, Sascha had been right about everything that had already happened. If a Russian man I’d never met could know about my hurt dog and my dead Catholic father and my girlfriend’s short hair, then surely others could tap into the movie of my life if they wanted. I no longer felt so alone, when I walked to class on empty streets.

I wondered if there really is a Big Guy in the Sky after all, watching over the whole kit and caboodle. I reminded myself that the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle applies to very small particles only. At the macro level, Newton and Einstein still rule. Maybe someone really could predict my behavior — and Judy’s — just by knowing us thoroughly.

I convinced myself that the earliest Judy would date someone else was in June, two months’ time. Meanwhile I continued to love her the best way I could, hoping to please her to the point that she would not feel the need to go elsewhere. And continued to worry that no matter how much therapy I would go through or what I would achieve, I might always be privately unhappy.

Other people to whom I told the story wondered why I took the predictions so seriously. I did not know what to say to them. “Maybe they had to be there,” I thought. Maybe they had to experience, for themselves, the terror of imagining that a stranger could foresee a second death in their family. Even though he said he saw no such thing, I had shuddered at the possibility; such a death just then might have broken me. Maybe it was that element that had burned the rest of the fortune into my memory.

The Devil’s work

My mother had told me years earlier that to visit fortunetellers was to open yourself up to evil forces. She said that nearly all talk of the supernatural was from the devil, because it distracted people from the Bible, the word of God.

I had stopped believing in the devil shortly after I stopped believing in God, but now I wondered if my mother might have been right. Certainly the anxiety that I was feeling did not seem to have come from Heaven.

I decided to go to a priest. I would confess the sin of having my fortune read, in case my mother was right and it really was a sin – and in case the priest’s absolution could break the hold the fortune had on me.

I went to the nearest Catholic church that Saturday afternoon, and waited for my turn in the confessional. When it was my turn I walked in, shut the door, and walked past the screen that people use when they don’t want the priest to see them. I felt that I should handle this issue face to face.

My confession

I sat down and looked up. A balding priest, probably in his late fifties, gave me a genial smile.

“Hello, father,” I said. “It’s been about four years since my last confession. Actually, I haven’t gone to church much, during that time. A little while after my father died I kind of lost my faith.”

He continued to smile, so I went on.

“But that’s not really why I’m here. A man read my fortune, and it’s got me all confused, and my mother says that fortune-telling is from the devil and I’m worried she might be right.”

He looked appropriately concerned.

I told him what Sascha had said, and waited for his opinion.

“Well, I don’t believe the ability to foretell the future comes from the devil, necessarily,” he began. “I think some people can just do that – they have a gift, the way other people have a gift for hitting a baseball.”

My eyes must have widened, because he smiled again.

“I think that one thing that may have made you especially nervous about this man is that he spoke mostly Russian,” the priest said.

I hadn’t thought of that.

“Foreign languages and customs can really heighten the sense of mystery and power,” he said. “I think that a lot of the power of the old Latin Mass came from the fact that people didn’t really know what the priest was saying. It carried more weight – it seemed holier – than when they were able to understand every word.”

Wow. I really hadn’t expected him to compare Sascha’s fortune to the old Latin Mass. And I certainly would not have expected a priest his age to be anything other than nostalgic for those days — a time when priests had much more power over their parishioners than they have today.

“Rather than this being from the devil, I think it’s possible that your experience with this Russian man may have come from God,” he said. “After all, it got you to come back to church, didn’t it?” He laughed.

I laughed, too, even though I had no intention of coming back to the church again anytime soon. He asked me to say a few Hail Marys and Our Fathers, and to spend some time asking God what this was supposed to mean to me. I did as he asked, aware as I knelt in the pew that the others who’d been waiting to confess were wondering what on earth I had done that had taken me 40 minutes to explain.

Relief

I was glad that the priest hadn’t accused me of invoking satanic forces. However, nothing he’d said had broken the spell of the predictions. If anything, he had affirmed my hunch that some people could see the future. Still, at least I was absolved of the previous four years’ worth of sins.

That was the first Saturday after the fortune. The second Saturday after the fortune, Judy went home for the night to Framingham, Mass., to see her family.

She came back to the dorm at around 11 the next morning. When she came into my room and asked, “How’s it going?,” I sensed immediately that something was wrong.

I didn’t know what. Something about her, the way her face looked. She looked vaguely preoccupied – guilty, but not too guilty. She looked as if she had done something she thought I might not like, but had done it willingly, for reasons she understood.

“What did you do last night?” I asked.

Her eyes seemed light as she said, “I hung out with my brother, had dinner with my sister. What about you?”

“Oh, I talked with some folks on the phone, hung out with Scott and Adam,” I said, trying to keep my voice level by speaking of my roommates. “What else did you do?”

“Nothing, really,” she said. “What do you mean?”

“I mean I feel like you did something else. I feel like you saw John.” John was her ex-boyfriend.

“What makes you say that?”

I couldn’t say what made me say it, and I wanted her to answer before I became upset and stopped her from telling me the truth, whatever it was. “I don’t know,” I said. “But did you or didn’t you?”

“I did. But what makes you say it?”

Even now it hurts to remember this, but not as much as it did then.

A short time earlier, Judy had told me that she felt happier with me than she had ever felt in her life. Her words had thrilled me, because being with her made me happier than I had known I could be.

Now, defeated once again by her attachment to a man that I had never met, I looked away from Judy to the blank wall above my bed. I felt despair. As she tried to soothe me and I tried to ignore her, I remembered suddenly that it was now two weeks, almost to the minute, since Sascha had made his prediction.

Two units

Two units of time. Not two months as I had thought, but two weeks – much sooner than I had expected. Until that moment, it hadn’t even occurred to me that it was two weeks since the prediction. I had not given her visit home a second thought. Yet she had gone out on a date with someone else, and even though she hadn’t told me, I had known.

This was weird. I remembered the way the apostle Peter had three times denied knowing Jesus without remembering Jesus’ prediction that he would do so. Only when Peter heard that cock crow for the second time – only when the full prediction had come true – did he realize what he had done.

“Self-fulfilled prophecy” was too hollow a description of what had just happened between Judy and me. She had no interest in fulfilling Sascha’s fortune, and had not kept track of it. She’d never met Sascha, after all, and had no reason to want to prove him right. When she saw John, she did so for reasons of her own.

To the hurt of feeling betrayed, then, was added the thrill that there might be meaning in the betrayal.

As our graduation approached, Judy continued to slip away, and I continued to try to hold on. Unable to admit defeat, I gave her everything I had, hoping that if she really knew me, she might stay.

At around 6:30 a.m. on the cool, gray, misty morning of the ceremony, we woke in her room to the braying of a bagpiper, piping away from 15 floors down. Judy and I were both of Irish descent, and hearing the Irish pipes playing in this Ivy League WASP’s nest was a true and welcome shock.

When he paused between songs, I shouted a request for “Amazing Grace.” He went right into it, as if he never got tired of that particular request. Later, playing as he walked, he led our dorm’s seniors through the streets of Cambridge to a big lawn, where Judy and I sat next to each other in our black robes, hiding and then not bothering to hide a bottle of champagne. Even as she smiled I felt her leaving. All that I could do was have fun while she was still there.

Days later I was home in Schenectady. My mom held a graduation party for me, where I talked with some cousins I hadn’t seen in a long time.

More prophecies fulfilled

Later that week I visited one of those cousins to try to learn more about my father’s father, whom she had known quite well. I did this because Sascha had said, “You should learn about this man; he is your spirit guide.”

Whenever I had asked my father and my grandmother about my grandfather, they had said simply, “He was a good man.” You could feel their grief. It had remained frozen in time, and that rigidity seemed to prevent them from elaborating on what they knew of him.

My cousin Ann, however, found it easy to talk about him as we sat in her living room. In fact, she said, “It’s funny that you should ask me about your grandfather. Because you know, I haven’t seen you for years and years; you used to be smaller.” She laughed. “But when I was at your graduation party and I was talking to you, I don’t know how to explain it, but for a minute I thought I was talking to him.”

“Really?” I said.

“Yes,” she said. “Like I said, I don’t know how to explain it. But you have his mannerisms — his whole way of being at a party.”

Well, that was more than I had expected to hear. I thought I had picked up my mannerisms by copying Jimmy Stewart and Jack Nicholson. I certainly didn’t get them from my father, who was stiff and uncomfortable at parties, even parties involving his own relatives. He didn’t like this about himself, but it was part of him, a shyness he had never been able to overcome. I did not have it in quite the same way. Maybe my temperament had skipped a generation.

Well, I had to say that Sascha was onto something with the paternal ancestor. I tracked down another old friend of my grandfather’s, and he confirmed what Ann had said. “Your grandfather loved parties,” he said.

I’d had no idea of this. I had assumed that he must have been as serious a man as my father was. But apparently that was not so.

So: Judy had dated someone else in two units of time, and my father’s father had turned out to be an extremely plausible ‘spirit guide,’ whatever that was.

Now the only parts left were the fame and the unhappiness.

Revisiting the psychic

As it happened I went back to visit Dean’s family in July, just three months after Sascha read my coffee grounds. Although I was afraid to raise the subject —- afraid to learn that more bad things loomed in my future —- I finally couldn’t stand not knowing. I asked Dean to ask Sascha to clarify what he had seen.

“Dean, please ask Sascha: What is the nature of this private unhappiness that I will feel all my life? What does it mean? Will my life be rocked by tragedy? Will I become depressed? What does it mean? And can I do anything about it?”

Dean nodded at my question, and began to explain my question to Sascha in Russian. I watched, wondering if it was a mistake for me even to ask about this. Would his answer throw me into new turmoil? I had been worrying for three months, and was now afraid that my worries might only get worse.

But something else was happening. Sascha looked angry, and seemed almost to be scolding Dean in Russian. Dean looked sheepish. Sascha continued to speak to him in harsh tones, and Dean’s eyes widened as he listened, his face serious and still. Dean said a few things back to Sascha, but they did not calm Sascha down.

I had to know. I wanted the whole truth, so that I could know what to do. “What is it?” I asked.

Looking apologetic, Dean said to me, “My uncle says that I mistranslated. He says that it is not that you will suffer great, um, private unhappiness, but rather that you will be disappointed by people, because they will not be as good, as nice, as you would like.”

I was skeptical, but relief was already making its way through my system. “That’s it?” I said. “The unhappiness is that I will be disappointed because people are not as kind as I would have liked?”

“Yes,” Dean said, and Sascha nodded.

“Oh,” I said, and sat back. “Well, I already feel that. That’s not so bad.”

I smiled. They did, too, but not as broadly as they might have.

So maybe they held something back. Maybe the severity is worse than I have experienced so far. Maybe some great betrayal is coming, sometime down the road, and I will hate it when it comes, and will curse my luck and curse humanity for the way it has disappointed me.

But at least I’ll be famous.

Originally published by The Guy Code, April 6, 2001.

So I was riding the bus through Flatbush the other day, hoping my CD player would work just as well at home as it had in the repair shop.

I was enjoying the third book in the Harry Potter series – the one about the prisoner who escaped from Azkaban. And I was noticing that, while author J.K. Rowling had made an inconsequential error concerning toads when her characters were in the Magical Menagerie — that is, she described toads eating dead flies, even though, as far as I know, even an enchanted toad won’t eat a dead blowfly, because unless a fly moves, a toad can’t see it; an old book about the brain features a poignant photo of a hungry frog sitting quietly amidst a dozen dead flies that hang from strings; because the flies weren’t moving, his optic nerve wasn’t firing; like a journalist, a frog sees movement only, so this one was starving in the midst of plenty – she seemed to have divination down pat.

Not that I’m an expert on divination, or anything; that’s why I’m using the word “seemed.” It’s just that as I sat on the Flatbush bus imagining Harry and Hermione and Ron learning how to read tea leaves, their teacher’s instructions rang true. Years ago, a man who followed the same ritual as that prescribed by Harry’s teacher read my coffee grounds, and the results changed my life.

It happened on Easter Sunday morning, 1990. I was in an apartment in the Bronx, visiting the family of my friend Dean. At this point I had been an atheist for roughly three years. Not long after my father’s death opened my eyes to some of the crappier aspects of life, I had decided that if there were a God then I was so angry with Him that He probably wouldn’t like me much either. And if He really did exist, then it didn’t seem to me that he did a whole lot for most of us, anyway. There seemed to be little point in praying to the same God who sat on His Hands during the Holocaust.

Life made more sense after I decided that there was no god at all. Becoming an atheist took away all of my worries about injustice. In a godless universe, after all, what else would you expect?

Is this all there is?

I remember well the first moment when I allowed myself to think that there might be no God. I was on the freshmen heavyweight crew in college. After a late afternoon practice I stood on the dock, looking across the Charles River at the dorms of Harvard and MIT. I looked up at the clouds in the sky and wondered, “What if this is all there is?”

I was scared even to think it — the nuns had done their work well — but as it turned out, the sky looked the same whether I imagined a guiding force behind it or not. I walked home slowly, lost in thought. What would life be like if I didn’t have to worry that my father, myself or anyone else would go to Hell? What should guide my decisions, if this life is all there is? I didn’t know.

Gradually my atheism deepened. Classes in evolutionary psychology and the history of the universe helped reinforce my new understanding. From a scientific perspective, there no longer seemed to be all that much for God to do. Scientists didn’t need to invoke His will to explain lightning, or earthquakes, or the formation of the planets from stardust. They didn’t even need him for that old trick Thomas Aquinas pointed to as proof – the creation of Something from Nothing. A few physicists were coming to the conclusion that it was in the nature of things that even a vacuum would eventually produce a particle of Something.

A year or so after I met Dean, he told me that his uncle could see the future. In a condescending way, I expressed my disbelief. By then, I had been strengthening my views for three years. And I was a senior at Harvard, after all: I knew everything. Dean was just a sophomore.

“Self-fulfilled prophecy,” I explained. (See, I had taken some psychology classes, too.) “Your unconscious believes in these things, and in some way you make them happen. The truth is, nobody can see the future. Even if there was a God, He wouldn’t be able to see it, either – that’s the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. All the way from a Vegas roulette table to a subatomic particle, life is a game of chance.”

Playing dice with the Universe

And it was chance that had brought me to sit with Dean’s family, on a sunny Easter morning, around a wooden table covered with a lace tablecloth. Dean’s mom had served us a delicious Russian breakfast. Now, instead of attending Mass, I was drinking a cup of coffee so thick that it would allow a middle-aged gypsy to read my fortune.

Dean was smiling, as I finished the coffee and his uncle began to look at the dregs in the bottom of the cup. But his uncle was not smiling. Sascha, the brother of Dean’s mom, had served as a soldier in the Soviet Army, back when there was such a thing (as there was, still, on that morning). He had been reading people’s coffee grounds for years. He said there was gypsy blood in his background.

“Hm,” said his uncle. “You have a dog. The dog is sick, or was hurt, or something – something not right with the dog. But you love this dog very much.”

That was true: Our family did have a dog, and I loved her very much, and something was not right with her. She had been hit by a car a few months earlier and nearly killed. She would certainly have died that day if my brother had not managed to find her, bleeding and shivering in the snow, badly injured, huddled away from the road on one of the coldest nights of the year. A car had hit our sweet dog and its driver had kept right on going, and the impact had broken our dog’s hip. Even months later, our dog walked with a pronounced limp.

Sascha was one for one. “But many people own dogs,” I thought. On the other hand, he had not said “You own two dogs” or “You have a dog and a cat.”

“Your girlfriend’s hair is about this long,” he said, gesturing with one hand to a spot just above his shoulders, His other hand held the coffee cup, into which he continued to stare. “You love her, but she is going to go out with somebody else, in two units of time. I don’t know if that means two months, two weeks, two years — but two units of time. She will go out with somebody else, and she won’t tell you, but you will know. And when she sees that you know, then she will know that you love her.”

That was more troubling. Judy’s hair was indeed that long. And the concept of ‘self-fulfilled prophecy’ could not protect me from the actions of someone else — even someone I loved.

“You like many sexual positions,” Sascha said.

I laughed. That was true, too — but it had not been true for long, which was interesting. The laughter helped to dispel, for a few seconds, the anxiety and humiliation I was feeling in the wake of his prediction that Judy would be unfaithful. ‘So what if she goes out with someone else?’ my laugh seemed to say. ‘I can enjoy those positions with others!’

When the laughter stops

However, when I had stopped laughing, I was scared and hurt. I had tried so hard to show Judy that I loved her. Could Sascha be right? Would it never be enough? Or would my being able to discern that she had dated someone else keep her with me?

What was happening to me — was I believing this man? Was he showing me something about Judy that I had simply failed to see?

Sascha went on: “You have an ancestor on your father’s side — a man wearing a hat. You should try to find out about this man; he is your, mm, spirit guide.”

I thought of my grandfather, my father’s father. He had died nine years before I was born; I knew little about him. But in both of the photos of him that I had seen, he had worn a fedora. And I remembered no photos of any paternal ancestors older than him.

“Your parents are apart,” Sascha said. “They’re very apart.” He was looking at the plate onto which I had overturned the coffee cup, and he seemed puzzled. To Dean I said quietly, so that Sascha could not hear me, “I wonder if he can tell that my father is dead.”

Sascha said, “Is anyone buried next to your father?”

“Uh, yes,” I said quickly.

“Mm-hmm,” he said. “Are you Catholic?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Because, there are two crosses,” he said. “If no one was buried there next to your father now, it might mean that someone would be buried there soon.”

I said nothing, but my heart was pounding. He had not said that anyone in my family would die soon — but he had raised the possibility, as well as the possibility that such things were preordained – out of our control. Just as he had done with Judy. That terrified me.

Of course, at some level, whether Sascha or anyone can see the future or not, it’s true that the future is largely beyond our control. But I didn’t like to think that.

Good news too

“You will achieve some level of fame,” he went on. “Perhaps as a politician, something. I don’t say, ‘You will be President of the United States,’ that sort of thing. But maybe a representative of some kind.”

That sounded positive. “Does that mean I will go to law school?” I asked. That was a path I was wondering about.

“Not necessarily,” he said. “Maybe some other way. It’s not clear.”

I had hoped he might say that I would become a famous novelist, but he did not mention writing and I did not ask. I was afraid that he might say he saw nothing at all.

“It’s not clear, but some kind of, um, public success,” he said. “But,” and he turned to Dean, and said some things in Russian, then looked at me as Dean spoke.

“My uncle says that even though you will experience public success, you will be privately unhappy,” Dean said.

By now I was nearly frozen in my seat. “Oh,” I said. Probably I looked scared. “Can anything be done about these things?”

Sascha shrugged. “Sometimes, a little bit, but,” and he said something else in Russian to Dean.

Dean said, “Sometimes, fate is just fate. Some things just have to happen.”

“I see,” I said, feeling helpless.

Sascha made a gesture that showed me that he was finished.

He had just performed a service for me and I didn’t know what to say. “Thank you,” I said.

He looked at me and shrugged again. Dean said, “My uncle says, he is not used to being thanked for reading such things.”

Now Sascha, and Dean, and Dean’s mother were all looking at me with great seriousness, as if wondering if I was all right.

“Well, I appreciate him taking the time to do that,” I said.

Sascha smiled, and we sat back in our chairs.

But they continued to look at me seriously, just as the class had looked at Harry Potter after his teacher predicted his early demise.

The bus dropped me off and I lugged the CD player and its accompanying stereo eight blocks. The player did, in fact, turn out to work as well in my Brooklyn apartment as it had in the shop. I put on K.D. Lang’s “Drag,” and had lunch.

The CD player worked, and now I could play records again, so I put on Roxy Music’s “Avalon” for one song and one song only, and that song was “True to Life” – because that morning, I’d dreamed that “True to Life” was playing in the background when I met my dad in an amusement park. So goes life.

Originally published by The Guy Code, March 22, 2001. 

Why do people kill themselves?

I revisited this question the other day while floating in an isolation tank. Specifically, I wanted to remember why I had so seriously considered suicide, on and off, for a period of some three to four years, during a time that was externally good.

So we’ll call this week’s column “Intrapersonal Guy,” if you don’t mind. (If you do mind, send me an e-mail.)

Some call them “sensory-deprivation tanks;” others, “flotation tanks.” By whatever name, these specialized bathtubs feel just as sweet. Someone pumps a ton of salt into an amount of water that’s about a foot and a half deep, seven feet long and four feet wide. The water is kept at the temperature of human skin, so you notice it less. As you might in the Dead Sea, you float comfortably on your back, your midsection sagging a bit but no part of you touching the bottom. You put in earplugs and turn off the lights, and simply float there for an hour or so. Sometimes you brush up against the side, but that’s about all the action there is. Eventually an employee comes along and knocks on the side. You tap back to show them you’ve heard them, and they leave, so you can re-enter the world of external sensations at your own pace.

Despite their depiction in the movie “Altered States,” tanks don’t normally tap into genetic memories in order to induce physical regression. I’ve floated three times now, and my musculature has remained stubbornly human. Not once have my guttural sounds led someone to open the tank and find me twitching and incoherent, with goat’s blood dripping from my mouth.

“Altered States” was inspired by the work of John Lilly, a pioneering neuroanatomist and dolphin researcher. The New York Times once described Lilly as “a walking syllabus of Western Civilization.”

Before entering the tank, Lilly would inject himself with lysergic acid diethylamide. Then he would float for hours, spacing out in a whole new way. Regular sessions with a psychoanalyst helped him process his experiences, so he could push them further. In 1966-67, it was not only legal for him to take LSD in this way – he also got paid for it, by the federal government, as had Ken “Cuckoo’s Nest” Kesey before him. The National Institute of Mental Health paid Lilly a salary for five years so he could experiment on himself. “Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer” is his report to them of how he used the grant.

When you’re not taking LSD, as I wasn’t, floating can be tremendously restful. According to one proponent, by shutting down external stimuli and giving you the illusion of weightlessness, floating can give rest to parts of your brain that have never rested before – parts that have had to pay attention to sounds and touch and gravity throughout your deepest sleeps.

Probably that’s not true, but it’s nice to think it might be. It adds to the experience.

Let the mind drift

Because I felt so relaxed, I felt safe to explore a time that I rarely dwell on anymore: the years when I nearly killed myself.

Typically when someone kills himself we say that he must have been depressed. It doesn’t help us much, to say that; it feels like we’re saying that someone fell asleep because he was tired. It’s not really an explanation, but we feel better when we can name a cause, however vague.

But researchers say that only some of those who kill themselves had been depressed. What’s up with the others?

Looking back on the experience, I figured I, too, must have been depressed. It was easier to explain it that way than to have to remember. But I wasn’t depressed. I was afraid. I remember that now. The tank gave me the tranquility I needed to recall that emotion.

Lying there on my back, in the warm salty water, I remembered lying on my side, on my boarding-school bed, afraid that I couldn’t go on. I was afraid of the pain of life, but mostly of the inevitability of Death.

You could say that I was excessively afraid because I had overgeneralized, or you could say that the rest of the world is insufficiently afraid because it has undergeneralized. It depends on your point of view.

The world, and particularly the modern American world, blames various controllable factors for death: heart disease, cancer, war and so on. It tries to address each concern.

I had grown up with that mentality, but suddenly all that seemed futile. I had seen what a river had done to my strong father.

The world might say, “Make swimming lessons and boating expertise mandatory.”

But I couldn’t say that anymore. Here’s where I might have overgeneralized: I decided that it didn’t have to be a river. Something would have gotten my father, I decided, whether it had been his heart or his brainstem or a slow growth on his liver or a speeding car or a bullet or an electric wire or a virus or a failed airplane or some other goddam thing. Likewise, something was going to get me, even if I stayed huddled in a sterile room for eighty years, and ate bran and drank carrot juice and exercised like Muhammad Ali.

No exit

Suddenly I felt trapped in life, because I had suddenly seen that no matter what I did, it would end.

Remember Willie Wonka’s chocolate factory, when Charlie and his grandpa were drinking that fizzy soda? The gas made them buoyant, and they giggled as they floated up and up. They were happy as clowns, doing somersaults in the air. Then they saw the rapidly revolving fan at the top, and felt themselves floating toward it in a way they could not stop.

They escaped by burping. They dissipated the gas and became heavier, gradually sinking back to the floor. We are relieved when we see this, in the movie. But we cannot do that, ourselves, because our problem is not caused by excess gas. It is a problem without a solution: One of the conditions of life is that it will end in a revolving fan.

As that truth sank in to me, my fear grew. Call it “fear of fanning.”

When something scares us, we try to move away from it, right? Or kill it. One or the other: Fight or flee. That’s how we’re wired.

Unfortunately we can’t fight Death, only individual causes of it. Nor can we escape it. Realizing that neither fight nor flight would help me, then, I thought about combining them. I wanted to flee Death by killing myself before It got me. I was too scared to just sit there quietly, waiting for the fan like everyone else. I could think of nothing but Death, and when you can think of nothing but Death, suicide seems all the more attractive. “At least,” you tell yourself, “if I kill myself I can stop thinking these terrible self-destructive thoughts.”

That’s not depression – not really. Throughout this time I was working hard and making good grades and playing sports and dating a little. I did landscape labor and painted houses during the summers. I ate regularly, if at times obsessively, and slept okay. Got elected president of the student council and got into Harvard. And through it all, including my first few years in college, I wasn’t sure I could let myself keep living, as long as there was a fan at the end of the tunnel.

I never “conquered” this fear. I doubt it can really be conquered, except by some personal near-death experience that shows you, for certain, that you will live on past the mangling fan. Like most of us, I have gone without such an experience.

Unable to conquer the fear, I began to ignore it, I guess. I suppose that’s how I forgot I had it. At some point I decided that this was all the life I knew of, and I might as well make the best of it. Now I cling to it as if by clinging I could hold myself back from the fan that will eventually suck us all in.

Here’s my Jerry Springer wrap-up: Violence may solve many things, kids, but unfortunately it can’t beat Death. Running won’t help either. You just have to live with that particular fear, and sometimes it takes a few years to figure out how to do that.

I’m glad I did, of course.

Next time I float, though, I think I’ll dwell on something more positive: I think I’ll try to figure out why I decided to get born.  ; )

Originally published by The Guy Code, August 20, 2000. 

As I took notes on what I had just heard, Anderson said that he was hearing from a young woman named Melissa. He said this woman knew some people in the audience, but not very well. After he gave more details, a graying, serious-looking couple in the back approached the microphone.

“Melissa is saying that she has someone else with her who wants to talk with you,” Anderson said. “She’s going to bring him forward, but she wants to make a bargain first. She wants you to promise to go to her parents and tell them that she is all right. Will you agree to do that?”

The couple, looking skeptical, agreed. Anderson then said that the young man Melissa was bringing forward was the couple’s departed son. “I understand,” said the husband, emotion leaking into his voice.

This couple had indeed lost a son. He had committed suicide six months earlier, with a young woman named Melissa. Now their son wanted them to know that he was sorry, but also that he was okay.

Anderson gave readings for another 45 minutes.

When it was over, the fiftyish woman on my right asked me how long ago my father had died.

“Almost 16 years,” I said.

She looked pained. “My husband passed almost a year ago,” she said. “And I just keep hoping he’ll contact me and say something.”

I nodded gravely. At the time, I thought she might have felt some resentment that I had heard from my father at a time when I didn’t need as much reassurance as she did. Now, though, I think her pained look may have reflected the fear that she would have to wait 15 more years to hear from her husband. Hard to say.

In the dining hall, an interesting woman I’d met the night before called me over to sit at her table. Another woman at the table had experienced what I had — she, too, had seemed to speak with a loved one through Anderson. We compared notes, asking each other how much of it had rung true, whether we had thought it was really them.

A number of women and a few men approached us from other tables as we ate our vegetarian lunch, apologizing for the interruption and asking us about the details. “Sorry to bother you,” one would say, “but did your father have a hard time seeing?” Yes, I’d say. “What about the lemons?” I explained their significance. “Did you think it was really him?” I’m not sure, I said, but it felt pretty good; I’m grateful for the experience.

Psychic powerball winners

People looked at me as if I was famous. My new friend Patricia said, “It’s like you won the psychic lottery!”

The other woman at the table who appeared to have made contact — in her case, with a former husband – was more relaxed than I was. She said she’d heard from him before, through other mediums, and wasn’t at all surprised when he “came through” today.

The people who were asking me about my experience were collecting details about others, too. It turned out that the sweetheart to whom Anderson had given the ribbon-wearing teddy bear had not left her house in four months, ever since the accident had killed her boyfriend. As for the teddy bear, she told someone, “I have a drawer full of those. He always used to give me those when he came by.”

We agreed that the bear was an unusual gift. If Anderson had said, “He wants you to have this rose” – well, a lot of guys give roses to their girlfriends. Not so many give them fist-sized teddy bears.

Patricia and my other new friend, Peg, told me how happy they were for me. I told them how glad I was to have met them the night before, so I had someone to talk to about this unexpected event. Pat and I walked around the beautiful grounds of Omega, talking about our fathers, both of whom tended to be distant and to erupt into rages.

As we walked down stone steps and gravel paths, over streams and grass, we found that neither of our fathers drank, but that both had often behaved as if they did. Pat works as an assistant superintendent of an upstate New York school district, and her intelligence and humanity put me at ease. She didn’t need me to either accept all that had happened or to deny it; we could just talk about it, and that was just what I needed right then.

* * *

During the train ride back to New York, I wondered something I hadn’t for many years: Was my dad watching me?

That thought led to others. If I became grouchy toward a stranger who wouldn’t move their bag so I could sit down, did my dad disapprove of my temper? Or was he glad I was sticking up for myself?

Or did he care?

How had his values changed?

Most importantly: Was he really coming to me in friendship?

* * *

When I got home, I rested for a bit, just thinking about it all. I looked at my notes, took a breath and began to call my family.

My mom wasn’t home, which was just as well. I was nervous about telling her this story. She is a born-again Christian, and had told me many times over the years that mediums and psychics drew their powers from the devil. I felt good about what had happened, but it was a fragile feeling; I was not ready to feel that sort of disapproval.

My brother wasn’t home either.

One of my sisters was on her honeymoon, hiking the Inca trail in Peru.

My other sister was in her suburban New Jersey home. She tends to be fairly grounded. I told her the story, not quite sure what she’d think — either of the story or of me, for going to see such a medium.

She said, “Well, I think that’s really nice. I’m not really all that surprised. I feel Dad around sometimes; I talk to him. I think he’s with us.”

“Really?” I asked. I was surprised. “I never feel him around. I really don’t. That’s great, though, that you do.”

Hmm, I thought. How come she never told me she felt his presence? And how come she could feel it, but I couldn’t?

* * *

I called my father’s mother – my grandmother. My dad had been her firstborn son, and her grief may be stronger, at this point, than that felt by the rest of us. She is from a generation that does not believe in sharing pain openly, though, so it’s hard to tell.

I hoped this story would comfort her – this image of her son standing, smiling, with her former husband. I told the story from start to finish, and waited.

“Did you give them your name, Bill?” she asked.

“Uh, well, yeah,” I said. “I mean, I had to fill out a form, to register. Not specifically for this guy Anderson, but for the weekend as a whole.”

“Yeah,” she said. “See, those people, they send out scouts to investigate people. That’s how they learn these things. Then they make you think it’s real. They send out scouts. I saw a program on TV about it once.”

I pictured a couple of solitary men in fedoras, driving sedans in the dead of night toward my hometown and that of 15 or 20 other people, ready to ask a few questions, take a few notes.

After she put the doubt in those terms, I believed, more than I had before, that I had actually spoken with my father.

If Anderson had used scouts, he could have been a lot more specific; I would have been much more easily convinced.

* * *

I called my father’s brother, my uncle. I began to tell him the story, but didn’t make it to the end.

A heart attack had left their father slumped over in a chair when my uncle was 15; that was a year younger than I had been when I lost mine.

When I said that Anderson had said that my dad was proud of me, I could hear the wistfulness in my uncle’s voice. My uncle said, “Geez, I’d sure like to hear my father tell me he was proud of me.”

I tried to keep going with the story, but my desire to do so was fading – the way you might tone down your excitement about a new bike, when you realize your listener still has to walk.

* * *

I called my brother in Philadelphia, where he was at business school. He’d been 11, a Little League baseball star, when the boat had overturned. A neighbor had driven him to the hospital from practice when the news came in. He was so young that he had just looked confused when we told him the news, and that expression had stayed on his face, underlined by pain, into the evening of that day.

My brother asked me now if Dad had mentioned him. My sister had asked the same thing. It hurt me to have to say ‘no’ to them both.

My brother was happy overall, though. Shortly after I had begun the story, I could hear him saying to his fiancee, “Hey — Bill talked to Dad. I’ll tell you about it in a minute.” He was laughing.

* * *

The next night, my mom called me. My uncle had told her part of it, but she wanted her to hear the rest from me.

I could hear a strain in her voice, and I could feel my own anxiety. I decided to ignore both, and just tell it straight. As I did so, my mom asked a few questions: “Where did this guy say he was getting the information from?” Well, he said he was getting it from the people themselves, Ma. “How was he saying things — was it all in one burst?” No, he spoke as if he were translating, from one language to another. One sentence at a time, maybe two, and then he would wait for a response.

When I finished the story I paused, bracing myself. “So what do you think, Ma — was it the devil?”

“I don’t know,” she said, her voice high. She sounded genuinely unsure, in a way that I hadn’t expected. “I mean, I don’t know what to think. It sounds like it was a really nice thing.”

I felt great relief. “Well,” I said, gently, “I guess the way I was looking at it, was — why would the devil work this way? I mean, it was a bunch of really good things that he told me – the type of things any son would want to hear. There wasn’t anything evil in what the man said. And he made the sign of the cross, before and afterward. He’s very Catholic — almost too Catholic, one woman said.”

“He did say some really nice things. But of course you knew your father would be proud of you,” my mom said.

“Well, no, mom, I didn’t know that at all,” I said. “I’m still not sure of it, in fact. You remember how he was.” I laughed.

“Yes, I do,” she said. She laughed, too.

“Maybe God allowed me to hear these things, so I could feel better about Dad,” I said.

“Maybe so,” she said. “And about yourself. Well, maybe you could pray about it, and ask God what He thinks of it all. Ask Him how He wants you to take it.”

“That sounds like a good idea, Mom,” I said. “I’ll do it. And could you pray for me, too, so that I’ll know how to take it?”

She said she would. And the next time we talked — maybe a week later — we both said we thought it was very nice.

* * *

My sister came back from Peru, and I told her what happened. But she had heard part of it already from my other sister, and by now it was getting to be an old story. It’s amazing how quickly our feelings shift, as time separates us from important happenings. We can’t even feel the same way twice about a movie we see two different times.

I asked her what she thought of the story. She said, “Gosh, Billy, I don’t know what to think. I mean, half the time I don’t even know if I believe in God. But it’s quite a story, anyway.”

* * *

For myself, now, more time has passed. For two weeks or so after I heard these things from George Anderson, I glowed inside. I felt something I had forgotten I’d ever felt at all: I felt like a son. A good son, at that. It was possible, I told myself, that my father was happy with me.

For those two weeks, I felt young and optimistic again, the way I had felt when I was 16 years old, just before the boat went under.

Gradually, the glow faded, as glows must. Walking on Brooklyn sidewalks sped the process along; the sight of a homeless alcoholic can disrupt the joy of even the happiest honeymooner.

Something remains, though. When I think of my dad now, I’m less afraid than I once was. When I talk to him, I do so as a potential friend.

I look at him as someone who recently popped in to say hello after a long time away. He no longer shows the burden of disciplining me, and I no longer show the burden of rebelling against him. It’s easy now, between us.

And if it’s a fantasy, so what? At least it’s a good one.

(Originally published on The Guy Code, June 25, 2000.)