Mind Games

Chapter Three of Cosmic Heart, a spiritual memoir

Cosmic Heart is a book I’m writing on Substack. Thank you for reading!

The mind and the brain are not the same thing, just as the soul and the body are not the same thing. The soul resides in the body, the spirit animates it and dances through it, and the mind does its dance within the complex pathways of the brain and the heart. 

I know this because I have been with a body once the soul has departed. Death is not a shutting down of the spirit; it is a shutting down of the physical. The soul and the mind and the spirit are the is-ness, and the is-ness goes on to some other plane of existence, some life we can not comprehend.

I don’t disavow the body. I am a soul, but I am also a body. We are all of these things - a soul, a spirit, a mind, a consciousness, a body, a field of emotions, an energy. We travel in the body, we are one with the body, but we are not contained by it. Our thoughts and emotions leak out into our environment. That’s how we read one another’s minds, feel one another’s essence, one another’s vibe.

When my father was in college, he was walking across campus toward class. I always imagined it was winter. I imagine he was pulling up his coat collar when a vision flashed in his mind’s eye. He saw himself entering the classroom and turning to see a message written on the chalkboard dismissing the class because the professor was ill. When he reached the classroom, he walked in, turned toward the board, and saw the message, exactly as it had been in his vision.

This moment of premonition sparked my father’s imagination. When my brother and I were children, he used us as test subjects. We played ESP games. My favorite was the one where my brother and I would close our eyes and picture a blank movie screen, and our dad would send a number or letter to that screen. We would slowly watch these images appear and yell out, “A black five!” or “A red zero!”

He kept track of the games on a legal pad, and our accuracy rate at guessing cards or envisioning images, which he says was above average. We also tried a bit of telekinesis but weren’t as successful. We had seen Uri Geller on TV and were captivated by the notion of bending spoons. A couple of times, we thought we moved objects with our minds ever so slightly, but that was probably wishful thinking.

Just like the time we found a dead baby rabbit in the yard, brought it inside, and placed it on a towel in a shoebox with a bowl of water and some lettuce. “That rabbit is dead,” my mother gently told us, but we insisted it was simply stunned or dehydrated. We were certain we could nurse it back to health. (We couldn’t.)

There exists, I believe, an innate human desire to do the impossible-defy gravity, become supernatural, jump timelines - to use a popular vernacular (and one I happen to enjoy.) I believe this desire exists because somewhere deep in our bones, we all know there is more to this life than we have been led to believe. Human beings have the capacity for much more than we are currently exhibiting or inhabiting. The world is not flat or linear. It is expansive, mysterious, and vast.

I have often wondered what life would be like if we were taught in elementary school to listen to our intuition, if we all played psychic games. If psychic ability were acknowledged as simply one of the ways living beings communicate, then perhaps we could exercise it like a muscle rather than fetishizing those who appear to have extraordinary abilities.

I don’t remember when we stopped playing ESP games at my house, but I was well into adulthood the next time I focused my attention on developing my psychic abilities. I was interested in energy and enrolled in Reiki training. During a psychic development section of that course, I had great luck reading for my partner, someone I’d never met. It was exciting to me, the same way, I suppose, my father’s premonition had been exciting to him.

I enrolled in additional psychic development courses with my teacher. She lived on a beautiful piece of land with a little chapel and art all around. We sat in a circle of stones, a bonfire burning in the center. We ate food together and listened to her wisdom, and we engaged in a variety of methods for intuitive reading, like holding objects or envelopes with photographs inside. We tried our hand at mediumship gallery readings and divination with oracles. It was all deeply interesting, but I found I had the best luck when we were put into pairs for one-on-one readings.

Images floated into my mind’s eye, words and thoughts floated into my head, and I felt things in my body - a sense of knowing. By this time in my life, I had been steeped in the new age philosophies of Hay House Radio and was keenly aware of the idea that we have spirit guides and guardian angels and a whole host of unseen beings hovering around us, but when I read for my partner, I did not have the sense that the information I was receiving was coming from anyone - like God, or a spirit guide, or a strange amorphous being known as the Universe. The information simply appeared - in my mind and my body - the same way images had appeared on that movie screen when I was a child. I just opened up to it, and it was there, like widening a camera aperture to let in more light.

Our teacher, a professional psychic and medium, began offering me paying gigs. She was often booked for parties, and when she had too many bookings to handle herself, she gave them to me. I never would have attempted to take money for readings on my own, but the fact that she offered this work to me gave me the confidence to do it. She had seen me read and she thought I was capable of doing it, so…I started doing it.

Once, I was sat at a table in a crowded Mexican restaurant, another time in the library of a mansion on a horse farm. Party guests, often drunk, would come in one by one, usually tell me they didn’t believe in all this stuff, sit down and ask me questions. I told them what I saw and heard, and felt. They handed me cash.

I started seeing people for Reiki sessions, too, but I noticed that almost everyone who came to see me was interested not only in the energy work but also in intuitively gleaned information. I ended up giving readings to almost all of my Reiki clients.

I slowly, steadily, built a little business. I gave readings over the phone. I recorded video readings. I joined up with a monthly mystical fair where I gave readings all day long from inside my little booth, decorated with a salt lamp and crystals.

The prominent belief within the spiritual community at that time was that if a person could do readings, they also had a responsibility to do them. The ability to do them was a gift bestowed by God (or the Universe) and was meant to be shared for the healing and betterment of others. I often heard readers say, “I just tell it like it is,” or “If it comes through, it’s meant to be shared.”

This made me uncomfortable. I didn’t then, nor do I now, think that psychic ability is a special gift. It’s a form of communication that is available to anyone who wishes to learn how to utilize it. Of course, some people are more skilled at it than others - just like anyone can learn to play the piano, but only some people are piano virtuosos.

At the mystical fair, I got to know a variety of interesting people who did this work professionally. I learned from them and was encouraged by them, but I had a push-and-pull relationship with giving readings that I couldn’t shake. I was both drawn to it and repelled by it. I never felt fully in my skin with words like psychic or intuitive. I didn’t want to tell people outside of the community that I gave readings, which makes promoting a business rather difficult.

I once heard a prominent psychic medium say that when he does readings, he sees his guides - sees them - sitting around a table, as if he is in a board meeting. I always wished to have experiences like that, and I knew that other readers at the fair saw and heard - knew- their guides. For me, spirit guides were a concept that I believed in, but when I did readings, I just saw, heard, and felt information. I didn’t have the sense that I was conversing with guides.

It took me a lot of years to realize that, of course, that’s the way I read because that’s how I was taught. As a child, sitting at the kitchen table, I learned to exercise my third eye, my intuitive knowing, by opening to the transmission, opening to the field, sensing the greater reality, and experiencing it in an instant rather than a conversation.

I am someone who loves to sit with psychics. I love to get readings, but I’m also acutely aware of the danger of turning over my inner knowledge to someone else. I am my own best authority. When I was giving readings professionally, I would sometimes encounter people who needed something else, some other sort of care. They came to me because they were suffering and they wanted me to give them an answer, a solution to end the suffering, but that was well outside my abilities.

I prefer to hold psychic phenomena lightly. It’s a part of my daily life, but it’s also a mystery. I like to think of it like a game, the way I thought of it as a game when I was a child. I take note of the hits, the things I get right, the predictions that come to pass. And as much as I enjoy listening to a good psychic work - I hold that lightly, too. We are all human, and information - whether it’s being sent by god or a spirit guide or simply perceived - is filtered through our humanness, our ego, and our ideas. A psychic intuitive or energy worker can be derailed by malignant disinformation just like anyone else.

Read the previous chapters of Cosmic Heart here.