Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer was a psychoanalyst and professor of clinical psychology at the University of California Berkeley and in the psychiatry department at the University of California Medical Center, San Francisco before her death at age 57 in 2005. “She was a fellow of the International Consciousness Research Laboratories at Princeton, on the research faculty of the Institute for Health and Healing at California Pacific Medical Center, and a visiting scholar in Human Development at Harvard University.”* Mayer saw herself as a cautious scientist as well as a caring counselor, whose inquisitive nature led her to research anomalous knowing and then to affirm its reality. As she began to publish her research, other scientists contacted her to share their experiences and for advice about making sense of these anomalous and transformative experiences of knowing. She relates several of these conversations in her book "Extraordinary Knowing."
Mayer writes: “In 1991 I was doing research on female development and seeing patients in my psychoanalysis practice. I was a training and supervising analyst in the American Psychoanalytic Association. I was busy and fulfilled, and life was running along the way it does.
“My eleven-year-old daughter, Meg, who had fallen in love with the harp at age 6, had begun performing. She wasn’t playing a classical pedal harp but a smaller, extremely valuable instrument built and carved by a master harp maker. After a Christmas concert, her harp was stolen from the theater where she was playing. For two months we went through every conceivable channel trying to locate it: the police, instrument dealers across the country, the American Heart Association newsletters—even a CBS TV news story. Nothing worked.
“Finally, a wise and devoted friend told me, ‘If you really want that harp back, you should be willing to try anything. Try calling a dowser.’ The only thing I knew about Dowsers was that they were that strange breed who locate underground water with forked sticks. But according to my friend, the ‘really good’ dowser can locate lost objects as well.
“Finding lost objects with forked sticks? Well, nothing was happening on the police front, and my daughter, spoiled by several years of playing an extraordinary instrument, had found the series of commercial harps we’d rented simply unplayable. So, half-embarrassed but desperate, I decided to take my friend’s dare. I asked her if she could locate a really good dowser—the best, I said. She promptly called the American Society of Dowsers and came back with the phone number of the society’s current president: Harold McCoy, in Fayetteville, Arkansas.
“I called him that day. Harold picked up the phone—friendly, cheerful, heavy Arkansas accent. I told him I’d heard he could dowse for lost objects and that I’d had a valuable harp stolen in Oakland, California. Could he help locate it?
Give me a second, he said. I’ll tell you if it’s still in Oakland. He paused, then: Well, it’s still there. Send me a street map of Oakland and I’ll locate that harp for you. Skeptical—but what, after all, did I have to lose?—I promptly overnighted him a map. Two days later he called back. Well, I got that harp located, he said. It’s in the second house on the right on D------ Street, just off L------ Avenue.
“I’d never heard of either street. But I did like the sound of the man’s voice. And I don’t like backing down on a dare. Why not drive to the house he’d identified? At least I’d get the address. I looked on an Oakland map and found the neighborhood. It was miles from anywhere I’d ever been. I got in my car, drove into Oakland, located the house, wrote down the number, called the police, and told them I’d gotten a tip that the harp might be at that house. Not good enough for a search warrant, they said. They were going to close the case—there was no way this unique, portable, and highly marketable item hadn’t already been sold; it was gone forever.
“But I found I couldn’t quite let it go. I decided to post flyers in a two-block area around the house, offering a reward for the harp’s return. It was a crazy idea, but why not? I put up fliers in those two blocks, and only those two blocks. I was embarrassed enough about what I was doing to tell just a couple of close friends about it.
“Three days later, my phone rang. A man’s voice told me he’d seen a flyer outside his house describing a stolen harp. He said it was exactly the harp his next-door neighbor had recently obtained and showed him. He wouldn’t give me his name or number, but offered to get the harp returned to me. And two weeks later, after a series of circuitous telephone calls, he told me to meet a teenage boy at 10:00 p.m., in the rear parking lot of an all-night Safeway.
“I arrived to find a young man loitering in the lot. He looked at me, and said, The Harp? I nodded. Within minutes, the harp was in the back of my station wagon and I drove off. Twenty-five minutes later, as I turned into my driveway, I had the thought: This changes everything.
Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer, Extraordinary Knowing: Science, Skepticism, and the Inexplicable Powers of the Human Mind (Bantam Books, 2007)
No comments:
Post a Comment