A woman with "impossible" intuitive knowledge

Elizabeth Mayer writes of a prospective patient who asked for a consultation. “She was a statistician contemplating a move to the Bay area for a new job. She was planning to accept the job offer, but wanted to discuss her decision. When she arrived at my office, a tall, elegant woman in her mid 50s, she greeted me cordially but moved right to the point: she was in a bind, a familiar one. She’d run away whenever it had arisen in the past. If she made this move, it might mean she was running away again. The fact was, she moved to keep people from getting to know her too well.

“For years she’d avoided getting psychological help out of fear that she’d be diagnosed as crazy. It began with something that happened in graduate school. It traumatized me. I’m scared to think about it even now. Versions of the same thing have been happening ever since. I keep running away, but that’s no solution. I need a different way to live with who I am.

“She explained that she knew things in ways that were real—she was defensive as she said it: ‘real’—but they were real in ways her colleagues called impossible. Could they right? Was I open to the idea that people might know things in ways that seems impossible and crazy?

I know things and it mystifies me how I know them. Sometimes it terrifies me. It starts with getting a good read on things. I’m intuitive. But lots of people are intuitive. It didn’t get really scary until I was in graduate school. I was in my third year of Ph.D. work. I had a good fellowship. My professors thought well of me.

I had an idea for dissertation that built on the work of one professor, someone I liked a lot, very smart but gruff. He was teaching a seminar. One day he’d given us a problem to work out—very complicated. I took it down like everyone else. Then I said the answer. Just said it—the right answer. To four decimal places. It just came to me. It seemed natural to say it. It was a disaster. The professor swore I must have stolen his notes.

After that, he wouldn’t work with me anymore. The other students stopped trusting me. It got so bad I had to find another university where I could do my dissertation research. I’ve been moving ever since. I get afraid people might start attacking me for things they think I shouldn’t know. Now I move before things blow up.

What happens is I will suddenly know something. Like, I’ll know when the experiment won’t work. Or I’ll know some data analysis is faulty. The more I let on what I know, the more obvious it gets that I don’t have any basis for knowing. It’s just an idea that comes to me. But I know—I can’t tell you how powerful the sensation is. Maybe you know what it’s like. It’s spooky. It scares me. I want to be normal.

“I gradually became convinced,” Mayer writes, that “Grace did have unusual and remarkable intuitive capacities. But the depth and extent of her virulent fear impressed me at least as much. As a psychoanalyst, I’m used to seeing fear. But Grace’s fear was unusual. She didn’t just fear for her mental stability. She feared for the stability of the world around her—the existence of a world she could count on, reliably constrained by boundaries of space, time, and individual identity.

Grace traced her intuition back to her childhood experience of protecting herself and her younger sister from her drunken father.

During the late afternoons, I’d start listening for him. It was a funny kind of listening. It was like listening with my whole body, not in my ears. I don’t know how to describe it except to say I was tuned in, vigilant with every part of me. Suddenly I know—know he was 15 minutes away and driving home drunk. Then I’d hustle my sister and me into the closet. I couldn’t afford to wait and hear him at the door. He’d crash in and grab whoever was in sight, then hit. He grabbed my mother a lot—she just stood there. So I had to be the one to protect my sister and me—I had to learn how. Somehow I just started knowing when he was headed home and when he’d be dangerous. I knew. It was like this spooky knowing with my professor; but it was different because I had to know, I had no choice.

My dad didn’t drink all the time. So there was no predicting. I had to stay tuned in every day, be ready and never trust any pattern. We’d go for weeks and be safe. But I couldn’t get lulled into thinking that’s how it would stay because suddenly he’d drink again and we’d have to hide. I’d have to know way before he pulled up at the house. As soon as I knew, I’d start getting ready—turn off the lights in the bedroom, get water for my sister, bring in her blanket, and settle us with pillows to make it cozy. How did I know when he was on his way and drunk? As a child I accepted it, I thought I just knew because I had to. But now that isn’t good enough. I keep wondering, am I crazy? If I’m crazy, how come I kept being right? It scares me to death.

 

Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer, Extraordinary Knowing: Science, Skepticism, and the Inexplicable Powers of the Human Mind (Bantam Books, 2007) 97-100, 97-100.

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How might we become more intuitive?

Elizabeth Mayer writes” “Helen Palmer was the last name on my list of professional intuitives. I’d listened to a taped session she’d done with a client I knew well, and I’d been impressed by her description of people and family dynamics with which I was very familiar. She’d also written a number of best-selling books and taught courses and workshops on psychological intuition. I scheduled a phone session with her, once again telling her nothing beyond my name. She promptly focused on the fact that she saw me writing something. My first response was my familiar knee-jerk skepticism. Lots of people write, I said to myself. My voice sounds educated. It’s hardly a surprising guess. People write all the time. And if they don’t, they feel flattered when someone tells them they’re writers underneath. None of what she’s saying counts as remarkable.

“Then Helen told me precisely how I was missing the boat on an article I’d been struggling to finish. And suddenly I was hearing just what I needed in order to shift gears entirely. By the end of our conversation, I had a mental outline of a brand-new paper. Two months later, it was off to the publishers. It was precisely the paper Helen told me I was wanting to write. At the very least, she’d saved me months of unproductive work. At most, she’d salvaged a paper that was on its way to the junk heap.

“Helen Palmer has written extensively about intuition and travels all over the world through her school, which teaches people to develop intuitive abilities. How does she access that intuition?

Maybe 75 percent of the process lies in getting empty enough to watch the different inputs of my mind. I follow my abdominal breathing until thoughts and feelings recede. The emptiness feels very nourishing, very soft and intimate. You lose awareness of the room, your body, and your face. That all goes, but there’s a separate awareness that stays. I need time to get empty, so I’m not anticipating, not resisting anything that wants to appear, before I focus on anything. Otherwise I get confused about where I am inside and can’t tell the difference between an accurate impression and my own fantasy projections.

Once you’re internalized, you establish a focal object, not trying for anything. The focal object is an imagined representation of whatever you need to contact. It could be a meditation symbol that you want to unite with, or an inner picture of some real-world event. You focus, and then wait. You doubt and you stay there anyway. You just keep shifting attention back to the focal object, until it starts to capture your attention. Then you’re ready. The process is the same if you’re focused on a ‘world’ question or knowing about spiritual matters, but it takes very precise concentration for spiritual knowing.

I’ve used the same contemplative exercises for wrapping imagination around a focal object for maybe thirty years. You just keep allowing the object to enhance in your imagination until it stops fluctuating. First the emptying phase, then the focusing phase. You clear the inner space, and then target the object. I maintain concentration by imagining the object as beautiful until the picture in my mind becomes so vivid and believable that it starts to play itself out. I don’t try for content or information. I just lose a sense of separation from the impression and take in whatever it shows. I think that focused imagination connects ordinary consciousness with a greater reality, so if you keep oscillating between enhancing the focus and receiving what it shows, a close relationship forms between the observer and the observed.

Meanwhile, you are so far removed from the room and yourself and the passage of time that you become whatever that focus is, so you know it from the inside. You participate with whatever you’re reading in a certain sense. You read another person accurately because you are them; you know them from the inside because you’ve stopped being separate. Then the thing is to track how you yourself get in the way. You have to make sure your placements of attention are precise so you’re not projecting. That’s why my teaching is so focused on knowing yourself and what you’re likely to project into a reading; that’s the only way to get reliable information with intuition.

Intuition operates from a different state than ordinary consciousness: quite decisively different from ordinary consciousness. If you don’t know that, if you don’t know how to shift back and forth between states, then you can start to feel very crazy, especially when you can’t immediately verify what you know. You need a conceptual framework that keeps you feeling normal. That’s essential. I did feel unstable early on, not about the states I went into, which were comforting, actually, but I felt such a terrible loneliness. I felt like a freak.

As I learned more, I realized the amazing thing was to be so located. My clairvoyance could locate people at a distance or at different points in time, so any accuracy on my part automatically located us both in a greater reality that people need to know is kindly and real. Clairvoyance isn’t a mind-to-mind thing, like reading people’s thoughts. It lets us see a much larger pattern of existence.

Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer, Extraordinary Knowing: Science, Skepticism, and the Inexplicable Powers of the Human Mind (Bantam Books, 2007), 43-55.

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"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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