"Everyone is intuitive. Most people block it out."

Elizabeth Mayer writes: “John Huddleston has been in private practice as an intuitive for thirty years, with clients throughout the country. For the past fifteen years, he has also been on the senior faculty of the Berkeley Psychic Institute, teaching others to develop their intuition. After a number of conversations, I scheduled a phone session with him. By now I was familiar with the uncanny sense, palpable throughout our conversation, that he somehow knew me. Half of me practically expected it.

“Then something happened that I wasn’t expecting. John came up with a description of a very close family member that was not only totally unlikely but also profoundly disturbing. I knew this person so well that, before we ended our session, I told John that he’d been right on a lot of things, but was totally off the mark about that one person. It was simply impossible that this person would do what John told me he’d been doing.

“John didn’t hedge. He seemed relaxed and easy, admitting he could be wrong sometimes. But, he said, he’d stick to his guns on this one. I hung up, uneasy but refusing to doubt my sense of someone I knew and loved. Twelve days later, I received the news. Everything John had told me turned out to be accurate. I was as stunned as the rest of my family—but they didn’t have to contend with the fact that someone had told me all about it twelve days earlier.

“John was able to recall the first time he became aware of picking up information on a different level:

It was in grammar school, in Wyomissing, Pennsylvania, when I was seven or eight years old. We were studying a textbook about world history. I remember the illustration in the chapter on ancient civilizations: a low-angle shot of the pyramids. Whenever I looked at it, I got light-headed, almost to the point of passing out. It was an extremely visceral experience, like being buried beneath a collapsing sand dune. If I turned the page, I would feel better immediately.

The information came from a different realm, but I knew it was genuine. And the otherworldly shimmer of the experience was fascinating and compelling. Where did it come from? Jung’s universal unconscious? Past-life recollection? I’d say the latter, because as children, each of us is much more closely knitted into that luminous world, which includes imaginary playmates, conversations with God, and glimpses of past lives.

It also helped that I was raised in an atmosphere where the nonphysical was accepted. My mother was a widely respected artist, and I can recall her pausing before beginning a landscape of an old red mill, ‘waiting to hear what the landscape has to reveal to me,’ she explained. And my grandfather, who was a university professor and author, drove down from Harvard to Walden Pond in 1893 so he could read Walden at night by candlelight in the remains of the celebrated cabin, the better to commune with Henry David Thoreau. He also wrote verses about past-life glimpses.

“I asked John to describe the state of mind he’s in when he does his readings:

It’s relaxed focus, that’s the best way to describe it. There’s calm, clarity, and a receptive quality. There’s also a physical component, and by that I mean I’m physically centered and grounded within myself, not drifting and discorporate. I’m in communion with the client, the barriers are down, and they are very easy to see, but I don’t merge with them in order to read them. This is not an out-of-body experience. In fact, my state of mind is surprisingly down to earth and ordinary.

“I had a hard time accepting John’s premise that what he was doing was by any stretch ordinary. John seemed amused at my consternation.

Ordinary? Oh yes, it’s surprisingly ordinary. In fact, most people use aspects of this state of mind in their daily lives without realizing it. For instance, an important key to this state of mind is ‘no effort.’ And that’s quite ordinary, because if you think of a time when you tried hard to remember something, you know the more you tried to remember it, the more you pushed it down within you. However, when you relaxed and allowed it to emerge, it bubbled right up. You accomplished that with no effort. That’s how intuition works. Effortlessness. It’s easier than you think. Doing a reading is as effortless as opening a garden gate and stepping into a new landscape. I simply observe the garden; I don’t have to create it.

Another state of mind is discrimination. A reading is like observing a huge, moving, transforming mural: the client’s health, relationships, family, joys and challenges, future—they’re all there. So discerning what’s important among all that is essential. Think of it as talking to a friend at a noisy, crowded party. You’re able to screen out fifty other voices and hear the voice that’s important. How do you do it? Well, you just do.

On a deeper level, spiritual discrimination is also what allows a mother to sleep through noisy trucks rumbling past, but awaken when her baby cries in the next room. And finally, a reading is also personally reflective; in the way psychotherapists are aware that they learn from their patients. Remember when you nurtured a friend when he or she experienced a death in the family? That was also an opportunity for you to uncover and heal some of your own unresolved grief. In a reading, both the client and the reader have an opportunity to learn, heal, and grow.

The truth is that everyone is psychic. Everyone is intuitive. Most people just block it out. Parents teach their kids to be sensible. They stifle the kids, who learn that intuition is unacceptable behavior.

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

A "past life" reading of Mayer's daughter

Elizabeth Mayer writes: “I’d heard about other people reputed to have intuitive capacities as remarkable as Deborah Mangus. Three stood out as both exceptional in their ability to know things inexplicably and convincing in their capacity to talk about what they knew in a sane, grounded way. I scheduled times to talk with them at length: Ellen Tadd in Massachusetts, and John Huddleston and Helen Palmer, both from California.

“During a trip east, I met with Ellen Tadd in person. At the beginning of our first session, I gave her only my name, no more, and told her I just wanted her to tell me what she saw. Again, I felt every skeptical muscle in my body working. Ellen started by looking at my right hand, which she said activated her clairvoyance, and began to describe my past lives. My wariness meter leaped into action. Past lives?

“I said nothing, but Ellen must have sensed my resistance. By the way, she told me. Don’t worry if you don’t believe in past lives. Just treat them as a metaphor. I personally find past lives a useful way to read people’s histories and see how those histories influence their current lives, but it doesn’t matter if you don’t.

“I calmed down. At least Ellen was a savvy clinician; she knew how to manage resistance. Metaphor. I could handle that. The conversation shifted to my daughters. Ellen said she saw that there was something out of balance between me and one of my children. That child, she said, was currently reworking a trauma from a prior life and I wasn’t helping her with it. Ellen continued, I see one of your children—a girl, I think?—as very careful, very serious about things. She seems much older than her age.

“In fact, I would describe one of my daughters that way, but I quickly reminded myself that it’s hardly a unique characterization. Ellen went on:

You’re trying to get her to lighten up. That’s a mistake. She’s reworking an experience she had many lives ago. That’s what this lifetime is about for her. She was a feudal lord on the Scottish border. She’d built a little utopia there. People were well fed, content. She’d devoted her life to them. People were so content they got careless about watching the border. One night a band of Picts, some tribal group, came over the border and destroyed everything. The people were completely unprepared. All the women and children were raped, tortured, killed. Your daughter is still carrying the terrible guilt she felt at letting her people get so comfortable they forgot how to fight.

When your daughter asks you whether she should paint the leaves on a tree light green or dark green, you think you’re reassuring her when you tell her that whichever she chooses will be great. You’re not reassuring her at all. For her, every decision is a decision about how to run her fiefdom, with all that consequence attached. It’s life and death for her. All those people are on her shoulders. You won’t help her lighten up by trying to convince her the color she chooses doesn’t matter. For her, it matters totally. For her, it’s not about paint; it’s people’s lives. You’d help her more by taking every one of her decisions just that seriously.

“The psychological truth Ellen had captured about my daughter and our relationship hit me as astonishingly apt. Even if I discounted completely the business about past lives, Ellen was absolutely right about my daughter’s psychology. Even more to the point, she accurately discerned that my attempts to help my daughter worry less weren’t working. That daughter does worry a lot. She loves to draw, but often asks my advice about every tiny detail of a picture. I typically tried to reassure her that any decision she made would be lovely, wonderful, good enough, but I’d been aware that the reassurance wasn’t helping.

“Suddenly, because of Ellen, I saw my daughter in a new way, with a clarity that was deeply illuminating and useful. I knew that what Ellen had told me was not just correct but important. No matter how petty the issue might seem to me, I was much more likely to help my daughter worry less by letting her know that I take her worries seriously. Of course, I think, I should have known that. Again I had the sense that Ellen was telling, just as Deb did, exactly what I need to know—what at some level I already knew, but hadn’t quite let myself know that I knew.

“In one sense, there’s something completely familiar about the way Ellen’s insight about my daughter hits home. I’m used to the way an insight feels when it’s right. I’ve been a psychoanalyst for thirty years. I’ve spent thousands of hours with patients. I’ve experienced many thousands of moments when some truth makes all the difference because it’s precisely on target, exactly what someone needs to hear. Much of my teaching is aimed at helping students hone their abilities to develop and articulate insights like that, insights that are precisely, exactly right. There’s nothing more crucial to clinical skill. So I recognize the ingredients. I recognize insight when it feels right. What’s not remotely familiar is getting there this way. How on earth did Ellen manage to get there? How did she get me there?

“By the end of my second conversation with Ellen, I decided to ask her a specific question. I was planning a research project and had five people in mind as possible collaborators. I needed to choose one. I gave Ellen a list of all five names—only the names—and asked her to assess the virtues and liabilities of each.

Ellen was quick in her response on the first three; everything she said fit with what I already knew of them. She got to the fourth name on the list and stopped. This was a man I’d never met, but whose work I’d read; I’d planned to contact him when my research proposal was a little further along. Ellen asked his name again. She was quiet for a minute, and then said she simply couldn’t find him. This happens sometimes, she told me; she just couldn’t make a connection. She moved on to the fifth name and once again had plenty to say.

“A month or so later, I was ready to contact the man whose name had been fourth on my list. I tracked down his phone number and called; a woman answered. I told her who I was looking for. I’m very sorry, she replied, but he died unexpectedly about six weeks ago.

“Coincidence? I compared the dates. He died exactly two weeks before Ellen and I had spoken.

“I asked Ellen when she first became aware of her intuitive abilities.

I had many experiences as a child where I felt other people’s feelings. I was often overwhelmed by the fact that what people were verbalizing and what I felt they were actually feeling were actually quite different. I also slept with my light on because I saw faces in the dark and felt safer that way. I tried to talk to my father about my experiences. He was a physicist, but he felt only that I had a creative imagination. He didn’t really understand what was happening to me. I sought out books for answers, but not another person. When I was nineteen, my dead mother came back and spoke to me and for the first time I realized that my sensitivity was a gift and not a problem. After that encounter I started to become comfortable with my sensitivity and worked to develop it.

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

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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