An "intuitive" describes her clairvoyance

After several sessions consulting by phone with Deborah Mangus, a professional intuitive, Elizabeth Mayer asked Deb “if she’d talk with me about the state of mind in which she sees what she sees. Were the images really visual? Where did she think they came from? Was she seeing into my mind? Was she seeing some objective reality outside my mind?

“Deb was responsive: thoughtful, interested, tentative, but willing to wonder and explore. She told me she wasn’t at all sure what she was seeing. She was even less sure how she did it. Some image would just cross her mind—once it was my youngest daughter and the word sprite. In fact, a friend had just been watching that same daughter in our garden and remarked on her being a ‘real flower sprite.’ Amused, I’d told him it wasn’t the first time the word had been used to describe her. Her fourth-grade teacher, trying vainly to help her see that her effervescence could use some control in class, had once compared her to a can of Sprite that had been violently shaken and suddenly opened. The image sent my daughter into gales of laughter for months afterward—during class. And it stuck. For years our entire family dubbed that daughter our sprite.

“Another time, Deb told me I needed nourishment. I hadn’t told her anything about not eating, but in fact I’d been off solid food for two days and had been counting the hours until I could eat again. Deb had me thinking about the word clairvoyance. Clear seeing.

“I asked Deb when she started seeing this way.

It has everything to do with my mother and her many sisters. When I was a small child and the phone rang, my mother would say, ‘Deborah, answer the phone, it’s your aunt Rosie.’ Well, my aunt lived in Yonkers and we lived in Connecticut and we wouldn’t speak to her for months. But with absolute belief, I’d pick up the phone, and say, ‘Hi, Aunt Rosie.’ Without surprise, my aunt Rosie would reply, Hi, Deborah, how are you, baby? Is your mommy there?’

I believe I was taught a certain channel of communication that I didn’t realize was out of the ordinary until I got to first grade. I would answer to what I thought my teacher was saying, but it would turn out I was responding to what she was thinking. So I was in the hall a lot in first grade. What my teacher thought and what she said were very different and I quickly learned to keep my mouth shut. The painful environment of my childhood narrowed it down to hypervigilance. I used the way I knew things to detect danger in the environment, to keep myself safe. The channel was honed by insecurity. The danger detector became well used when I worked as a nurse in high-risk settings. I intuited danger, and then validated it with machines and scientific scrutiny.

Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer, Extraordinary Knowing: Science, Skepticism, and the Inexplicable Powers of the Human Mind (Bantam Books, 2007).

Focusing on his cells led to spontaneous healing

Robert Pyles, M.D., while president elect of the American Psychoanalytic Association, sent psychologist Elizabeth Mayer a personal account that he’d never previously revealed to anyone:

Some years ago I was diagnosed with a viral meningoencephalitis. Over the course of my being worked up, they discovered a large mass in my chest along with the infiltrate throughout my lungs. It turned out to be disseminated sarcoidosis. I lost forty-five pounds and the disease seemed to be taking its expectable course—invasion of other organs and a high probability of death not too far off. I began meditating, then running, mostly to calm myself down. I had young kids, an active career—I wasn’t handling the prospect of an early death well at all.

Without knowing what I was doing, I felt the impulse to focus on my actual cells—my literal physical cells—as I ran. Then I began focusing on the lesions. And something very strange began happening. It will sound hallucinatory and crazy—I thought it was totally crazy at the time—but all I can say is, it was also very real and powerful. What started happening was I literally became those cells and those lesions while I ran. And once that happened, the lesions started getting smaller. I became the lesions resolving. I watched them resolving and I was them resolving.

And sure enough, the mass started decreasing and after three years the infiltrate was gone. Gone. Eventually, the mass totally disappeared. In fact, I was written up in a medical journal—a spontaneous resolution of a disseminated sarcoidosis that was entirely unexpected and unexplained.

The evidence for what happened is medically irrefutable. I myself am sure that running got me into a state of mind that enabled me to affect those cells and those lesions by—strange as it sounds—becoming them. That experience didn’t just change my life because I was cured—it also opened a world of possibilities about connections between things we’re normally unaware of, connections rooted in access to certain states of mind.

Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer, Extraordinary Knowing: Science, Skepticism, and the Inexplicable Powers of the Human Mind (Bantam Books, 2007), 10-15.

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A brain surgeon reveals why he's so successful

In her book Extraordinary Knowing psychologist Elizabeth Mayer asks: “Is it possible to investigate apparently anomalous experiences while remaining firmly grounded in rational thought?” And answers: “I dearly value the rational world and all it enables, while facing the awareness that it’s a world with no room for experiences like the harp’s return. We need, however, to address what it may take to acknowledge and appreciate both worlds, and manage to live in both at the same time. I don’t insist that any reader swallow the stories in these pages as true; I consider myself a skeptical, highly trained scientific professional, and feel that perspective is essential if we are to make any creditable analysis of anomalous events. Yet, after fourteen years of studying such phenomena with my skepticism firmly in place, I believe that these vast arrays of experiences deserve our serious attention.

“The stories in this book, along with the questions they raise, have led me to consider an inescapable possibility. As human beings, might we be capable of a connectedness with other people and every other aspect of our material world so profound that it breaks all the rules of nature we know? If so, it’s a connectedness so radical as to be practically inconceivable. In this book, I’ll suggest how we can start to render such a radical connectedness more conceivable by making a kind of sense out of it.

“We can begin by looking to certain transactions that we haven’t conceptualized before, transactions that take place between the realms we call mental and material. They’re transactions that occur between the realm of unconscious mental processing—as understood by contemporary psychology, neuroscience, and cognitive science—and the realm of intangible physical dynamics, which fields such as quantum physics are beginning to explore.

“I’ll suggest that these transactions are characterized by a paradox that helps explain why we haven’t acknowledged them, much less found ways to understand them. They reflect human capacities to which we can’t gain access in the customary ways. Their peculiar capacity is that they’re least likely to become available when we deliberately try to access them. We cannot reach these new sources of information simply by ‘tuning in’ to something new; paradoxically, we must also ‘tune out’ much of the ordinary information that continually bombards our senses. While some people appear born with an innate gift for doing that, it may be possible for the rest of us to learn to develop precisely that same quality of awareness, an awareness that might result in a subjectively felt state of profound connectedness to other human beings and to every aspect of the material world around us.

“If that state exists and we can achieve it, we may also develop distinct perceptual capacities, including an intuitive intelligence whose development and training our culture has largely overlooked. Refining and educating such an intelligence has huge implications for how we see the world because it changes what we are able to see, changing what we’re able to know as a result.

“As I’ve come to believe, extraordinary knowing may not be so extraordinary after all, but part of ordinary knowing that we simply haven’t known how to account for. If that’s true, we might start inhabiting our world with a different, radically more hopeful outlook for our future.”

“A neurosurgeon of world-class reputation calls me. He’s been suffering from intractable headaches. Despite exhaustive medical workups, no physiological cause for them can be found. In desperation, he’s called for a psychological consultation—a last resort, in his view.

“During our first appointment, he begins to describe his work. He’s passionate about it. He is also supremely successful. When heads of state need brain surgery, he’s flown in to operate. His reputation rests not just on the brilliance of his technique but even more on his astonishing track record. He undertakes one dangerously life-threatening surgery after another, yet he tells me, humbly and with quiet gratitude, I never seem to lose a patient. He has a loving marriage and wonderful children. He can’t think of anything troubling him, no obvious subconscious source for the crippling headaches that are destroying his life.

“I probe a little, looking for some hint of possible conflict, anxiety, or pain. He, on the other hand, keeps going back to his work, lighting up as he talks about it.

“And then it occurs to me that he hasn’t mentioned doing any teaching, even though he’s on the staff of a big university hospital. So I ask: Does he teach residents? He looks away, suddenly silent; finally, he answers:

No, I don’t teach at all anymore.

But you did? What happened?

I had to stop.

You had to?

Yes . . . I couldn’t keep it up . . . but I miss it. I loved teaching. As much as surgery itself, I loved it . . . but I had to stop.

“He falls silent again. Gently I probe further. Why did he have to stop? And then slowly, reluctantly, the surgeon tells me what he’s never told anyone. He can’t teach anymore because he doesn’t believe he can teach what he’s really doing. He tells me why his patients don’t die on him. As soon as he learns that someone needs surgery, he goes to the patient’s bedside. He sits at the patient’s head, sometimes for thirty seconds, sometimes for hours at a stretch. He waits—for something he couldn’t possibly admit to surgery residents, much less teach. He waits for a distinctive white light to appear around his patient’s head. Until it appears, he knows it’s not safe to operate. Once it appears, he knows he can go ahead and the patient will survive.

How, he asks me, could he possibly reveal that? What would the residents think? They’d think he was crazy; and he thinks, maybe he is crazy. But crazy or not, he knows that seeing the white light is what saves his surgeries from disaster. So how can he teach and not talk about it? It’s a horrible dilemma. He’s adopted the only solution: he’s quit teaching.

And when did your headaches begin? I ask him. Startled, he looks up at me. It hits him and hits him hard.

“That’s interesting, he says. The headaches started two years ago. And I remember when I noticed the first one. It was the day I resigned from teaching, right after I told the dean.”

 

Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer, Extraordinary Knowing: Science, Skepticism, and the Inexplicable Powers of the Human Mind (Bantam Books, 2007).

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Cancer healed & other extraordinary experiences

Elizabeth Mayer writes: “The way I found the harp changed how I work as a clinician and psychoanalyst. It changed the nature of the research I pursued. It changed my sense of what’s ordinary and what’s extraordinary. Most of all, it changed my relatively established, relatively contented, relatively secure sense of how the world adds up. If dowser Harold McCoy did what he appeared to have done, I had to face the fact that my notions of space, time, reality, and the nature of the human mind were stunningly inadequate. Disturbing as that recognition was, there was something intriguing, even exciting, about it as well.

“Weeks after I’d published my first tentative foray into exploring mind-matter anomalies, a physician I barely knew came up to me at a professional meeting. He’d read my article and wanted to tell me something. The story poured out. He’d been diagnosed 20 years earlier with fatal bone cancer and had become deeply depressed. As a marathon runner, he’d found relief from despair only while he ran. Early one morning, two hours into his run, he’d been suddenly overcome by what he described as a sensation of light—clear, soft light, as though the light was filling my bones, as though light and air were infusing each bone. I saw it—light penetrating those bones, right through to the marrow.

“The next week his X-rays were clean. I’ve never told another colleague, he said. I told my wife when it happened—no one else. And this part I didn’t tell anyone: I know that’s what cured me. The light crowded out the cancer cells. I don’t know how, but I know it did.

“As word of my new interest spread, my medical and psychoanalytic colleagues began to inundate me with accounts of their own anomalous experiences, personal as well as clinical. As with the physician, the stories they shared with me were often ones they’d never revealed to another professional associate. Their accounts—by email, snail mail, at conferences, and seminars, in hall corridors, or at dinner—made as little sense to me as they did to the colleagues telling me about them. The stories were all about knowing things in bizarrely inexplicable ways:

My patient walked in and I knew her mother had died—no clues—I just knew, instantly.

I woke up in the middle of the night like I heard a shot; the next day I found out it was when my patient took a gun and tried to kill herself.

I suddenly felt that my partner’s son was in trouble. I called my partner; it worried him enough that he tracked down his son. His son had been in a bad car accident and my partner got there just in time to make a decision about surgery that probably saved his life.

“I was particularly fascinated by how eagerly my colleagues shared even the most weirdly personal stories with me. Their eagerness puzzled me, until I realized how badly people wanted to reintegrate corners of experience they’d walled off from their public lives for fear of being disbelieved.

I was on a bus and all of a sudden found myself smelling the perfume my brother’s ex-wife used to wear. When the bus stopped, she got on. I hadn’t smelled that perfume or seen her in thirty years.

My husband and I fell in love with a house in London on our honeymoon—very distinctive, across from a park. Fourteen years later, living in Boston, I woke up one day, and thought, maybe we could buy it. I tracked down a realtor in London, asked if she could figure out the address and find out if it was for sale. Crazy! But she did. The man who’d been living there had just died; the For Sale sign wasn’t even up yet. We bought it the next week.

“I was somewhat stalled with one deeply troubled patient, Mayer writes, “a woman who was isolated and very frightened of the world. For years she’d insisted she couldn’t remember any of her dreams, and indeed she’d reported almost none to me through our work together. Then, during one session, she told me that the night before she’d dreamed of my going to Arizona. I had indeed been planning a trip to Arizona that week, but I’d told none of my colleagues or patients about it.

“I asked her, why Arizona? She had no idea, no associations. I told her that I was in fact going to Arizona and wondered if she somehow picked that up. For a moment, she was quiet. Then she hesitantly told me that she often had dreams in which she knew where people were going, and it turned out she was right.

“She couldn’t begin to explain it. She’d learned not to tell people; it was too weird. She had had dreams like that as a child and her parents had raged at her and called her crazy. They would sometimes beat her until she said she’d made it all up. So she’d learned to shut up and started pretending that she didn’t have dreams, that a lot of things she experienced weren’t real. Pretending to others, and to herself, had made her feel safe, but it had also made her feel she wasn’t real.

“That exchange with my patient was a turning point in her psychotherapy. It was also a turning point for me. My evident curiosity about her dream had liberated a flood of experiences. As my patient started believing that I could believe her—and considered her neither crazy nor dangerous—a new world opened up between us. She began for the first time telling me about other bizarrely intuitive experiences, and about how they terrified her. Bit by bit, her comfort in the world took new root. Her life changed in profoundly positive ways. She told me that she started feeling she could be real.

“My patient’s fear—of being unable to credit the evidence before her eyes, of being thought crazy, of losing the comfort of being believed—began to take on an enormous resonance for me. I still wanted to make sense of my own experience with the harp. But I also wanted to understand more about why our culture is so fearful about anomalous experiences.

Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer, Extraordinary Knowing: Science, Skepticism, and the Inexplicable Powers of the Human Mind (Bantam Books, 2007).

Extraordinary Knowing

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)

 

*Kathy Pfrommer, “Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer, 57, Dies,” East Bay Times (Jan. 5, 2005), https://www.eastbaytimes.com/2005/01/05/elizabeth-lloyd-mayer-57-dies/.

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NDEs have renewed my Christian Faith

Not long after my mother died, my father during surgery suffered a cardiac arrest. As the physicians worked on his unconscious body, he “awoke” floating above the operating table―seeing the physicians working frantically to revive him and hearing their voices. Then he found himself moving through a dark tunnel toward a bright light, where he saw my mother, smiling and waiting. As he came near to her and into the light, he felt an overwhelming sense of being loved and forgiven. But my mother communicated to him that it wasn’t his time yet, and then he floated back through the darkness and into his aching body.

For several years my father didn’t tell anyone of this extraordinary experience, but finally he shared it with me. Trained as a scientist, he had no way to explain his near-death consciousness during his cardiac arrest under general anesthesia. His life was altered, however, by what he experienced and remembered. My father was not a religious man, but his near-death experience (NDE) left him without any fear of death. Also, I believe, he became more loving and accepting. At age 90, when a second stroke left him unable to swallow, he told me his time had come. He asked that his IV be disconnected and that a Do Not Resuscitate (DNR) order be entered into his medical record. After a day without water or food, he slipped into a coma and three days later died peacefully.

My father’s NDE not only changed his life, but mine as well. Since his death I have read many accounts of near-death experiences and studied the research reported by physicians and other scientists. My father’s experience and my research have also affected my recent writing about faith, consciousness, and science. My essays are available online primarily on two of my four web sites, but especially on the web site at www.doingfaith.com. I cannot adequately summarize all these readings and how they have changed my thinking, but here are few paragraphs that try . . .

First, I am now convinced we are souls having a human experience, rather than human beings who some believe have souls. By “soul” I mean living-perceiving-meaning moments of consciousness that come from (and in this life continue to be part of) the sustaining timeless source of all living-perceiving-meaning. NDEs such as my father’s verify an enhanced consciousness that is not the result of brain activity—and in fact seems to require the loss of ordinary consciousness. NDE survivors affirm we all are part of an enhanced and endlessly creating consciousness.

Physicists describe this unfolding or evolving consciousness as the nonlocal background for all that is. In the words of Christian teaching, we “live and move and have our being” in “the kingdom of God.” This kingdom, of course, is immaterial, but hints of it enter our material experience. NDEs especially reveal the power and purposes of this spiritual realm, or what several of the authors in this collection call “the Other Side.” I believe the Light my father and millions of others have experienced during an NDE confirms the Christian witness that “nothing can separate us from the love of God”—whether we are Christians or participate in other religious traditions or are agnostics or atheists.  

Second, I know that our purpose in this life is to grow in the Light of this unconditional Love. In every moment, in the trials of living and dying, and in all our relationships, this is our challenge and opportunity. We always have a choice to love creatively, with courage and hope. We can strive to be forgiving, as we have been forgiven. We can embrace our living and dying with gratitude and joy. Each of us has our own fate—a calling to our individual quest to wrest faith and hope from suffering. Yet, we all are One in this extraordinary adventure.

Along the way each of us will have guides from the Other Side—from loving angels or caring ancestors or other beings. Or from what psychologists identify as our unconscious. This guidance will usually be ambiguous, as we each must find our own way. Our evolving-loving-consciousness is part of the timeless evolving-loving-consciousness that gives meaning and purpose to all reality. I encourage you to look for your guidance in prayer, meditation, humor, art, music, and children, as well as in your disappointments.

Third, I am filled with hope that we come from and will return home to the everlasting Light offering unconditional Love. We enter life on earth with a purpose, I now believe, and whether or not this purpose is fulfilled we will end our embodied experience on earth with a forgiving life review and new insights into the meaning of our cosmic adventure. 

 

The photo shows my father and oldest child, Kim Traer. I'm grateful for the lessons I've learned from each of them.

NDEs have real effects

Kenneth Ring’s main focus in Lessons from the Light is on the after effects experienced by NDE survivors. He writes: “These studies show that whatever the nature of the NDE, it is real in its effects.” NDE survivors often “say that following their experience, they did not become more religious, but more spiritual. By this, they seem to mean that the formal aspects of religion—in the sense of organized religion—become less important to them and a more universal and inclusive spirituality that embraces everyone comes to exert a deeper hold on their allegiance.

“Many NDErs afterward tell us that they find they have become unusually sensitive to light, sound, humidity, and a variety of other environmental stimuli or conditions. Taste sensitivity increases, and one’s tolerance for alcohol and pharmaceutical drugs diminishes. Not surprisingly, NDErs report more allergies. Also, a large proportion of these persons discover, for instance, that digital wristwatches will no longer work properly for them, or they ‘short out’ electrical systems in their cars, or computers and appliances malfunction for no apparent reason." (126-30)

What is known as “the life review” has a significant effect on many NDE survivors. Ring writes: “While it is true that there is an aspect to the life review in which one watches the scenes of one’s life like a spectator, many persons report that at the same time they are in these scenes and are living through them as if they are actually experiencing them again.

One NDE survivor recalls: What occurred was every emotion I have felt in my life, I felt. And my eyes were showing me the basis of how that emotion had affected my life. What my life had done so far to affect other people’s lives, using the feelings of pure love that was surrounding me as the point of comparison. And I had done a terrible job. God, I mean it! Looking at yourself from the point of how much love you have spread to other people is devastating’. (Ring, Heading toward Omega, 71.)

“For the experiencer, the life review is not only a personal revelation or an insight into principles of cosmic relevance, but also a healing. Not just what you see about yourself, but how you come to see and understand it is what heals you of what may be long-standing feelings of inadequacy and patterns of self-defeating behavior. The result is a kind of forgiveness of oneself and others that returns you to your authentic self." (147-98)

Finally, Ring writes, NDE survivors have no fear of death. “Those facing death do not fear it; they know the Light awaits them. Those who wish to take their own life learn that it is impossible to do so; there is only life. Those who grieve are comforted and sometimes even transformed. And those blessed with a vision of a loved one who has left them know with certitude that their beloved still lives and that the connection has not been broken.

I looked further down the tunnel and saw the light. I realized immediately where I was. The light was home. I knew that I could only return here. There was no question of losing this place. It was home, and I, and everyone else, came here and there was no possible way to avoid it or miss it. It was the only thing that was guaranteed, returning here.

Ring concludes, by affirming: “the true promise of the NDE is not so much what it suggests about an afterlife—as inspiring and comforting as those glimpses are—but what it says about how to live now." (248-82)

Kenneth Ring and Evelyn Elsaesser Valarino, Lessons from the Light: What We Can Learn from the Near-Death Experience (Insight Books, 1998; Moment Point Press, 2006).

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