NDEs cannot be explained as brain activity

“Anyone who dies,” Dr. Parnia explains, “loses consciousness with the immediacy of a hammer blow, and electrical activity in the brain ceases in about ten seconds. Scientifically speaking, people who lose consciousness under these circumstances, by definition, should not be able to report highly lucid, details, and chronologically accurate memories and accounts of the experience. And in fact, the vast majority of patients who undergo any brain injury don’t remember anything immediately preceding or following the incident. Yet somehow people who claim these conscious mental processes during the period of clinical death enjoy an inexplicable ability to recall details of which they should be wholly unaware.”

“Because brain function is so complex, scientists investigating NDEs looked for further chemicals that could be involved in the dying brain theory—that is, the theory that a chemical change in some part or parts of the brain involved with human experiences, sensations, and feelings could be causing the experience to occur as a type of hallucination. Drugs administered at the time of death seemed like an obvious explanation, but an examination of the medical literature doesn’t support this possibility. Studies show that many NDEs took place without any medications even being administered or that people with and without the experiences had had the same medications.

“The bottom line is that no brain-based chemical change can define whether a sensation or feeling is real or not. The brain regions involved with any feeling or emotion may not distinguish how they have become active, just that something has activated them.

“Dr. Karl Jansen, a New Zealand brain researcher with expertise in the effects of drugs on the brain, studied the effects of ketamine and suggested that NDEs might be occurring as a hallucination through activation of the same areas of the brain when people are critically ill and deprived of oxygen. Testing this theory was another matter. Its major limitation is the same as the oxygen theory.

“Not only would identifying a specific receptor or chemical not determine the reality or otherwise of the experience, the receptor being discussed (the NMDA) receptor) is very widely found in the brain and is involved in many other experiences and activities, such as memory recall, without causing hallucinations. Therefore, it would not be sufficient to assume that simply by virtue of it being active, an experience is a hallucination or real.

“Another impediment to testing this theory, as with all chemical-based theories, is that after death has taken place, the brain has shut down and these cells are not in their usual state but are in fact undergoing their own process of death. They are severely abnormal and not in a state to mediate thought processes, whereas when someone has taken drugs and hallucinates, the brain is functioning and the cells are not dying, which is why he or she can experience these visions.

“The other problem with the theory was that the hallucinations described by people who used drugs were not like the visions described by those who had NDEs."

Sam Parnia, Erasing Death: The Science That is Rewriting the Boundaries Between Life and Death (HarperOne, 2013), 225-227.

MD calls the NDE an "Actual Death Experience"

Dr. Sam Parnia presents several striking NDE accounts, but also discusses possible medical explanations due to lack of oxygen, chemicals present in the body, and psychological hypotheses. Noting that contemporary medical care in hospitals has extended the time a patient can be without heart or brain function, and yet be resuscitated, Parnia suggests the phrase Actual Death Experience (ADE) is often more accurate than Near-Death Experience (NDE).

One of Parnia’s patients shared with him this life review during his NDE: I wasn’t just watching the events. I was reliving the experience from their point of view and at the same time (and I don’t know how this works) I was also experiencing it from a higher reality; the truth of the matter. I saw my own lies and my own self-deception, which I had used to convince myself that doing certain things was okay because people had deserved it.

Then I was experiencing the emotional impact it had on other people. I felt their pain. I felt the shock on them. But then at the same time I also saw that they have their own lies and self-deceptions and so the net result was that I felt like I was a failure as a person and I wasn’t the person I had thought I was. I felt really dreadful and it was completely humbling.

The NDE survivor clearly affirmed: the judgment came all from myself. It was not from an outside source, but then this being that was with me was also sending me comforting messages—thank goodness!—and one of them was it was alright as I was only human.

Parnia writes of a case involving a three-and-a-half-year-old boy named Andrew who had open-heart surgery. Two weeks after the surgery, Andrew asked his parents when he could go back to the sunny place with all the flowers and animals. His mother said, yes, they’d go to the park again.

No, I don’t mean the park, he said. I mean the sunny place I went to with the lady. When she asked what lady, he replied, The lady that floats.

“His mother told him she didn’t understand what he meant.

You didn’t take me there. The lady came and got me. She held my hand and we floated up. You were outside when I was having my heart mended. It was okay, the lady looked after me, the lady loves me. It wasn’t scary. Everything was bright and colorful [but] I wanted to come back to see you.

Later, in an unrelated situation, Andrew’s mother showed him a photo of her own mother, who had passed away. Andrew said, That’s her. That’s the lady. The lady he was referring to was his deceased grandmother.”

Sam Parnia, Erasing Death: The Science That is Rewriting the Boundaries Between Life and Death (HarperOne, 2013), 133-138.

NDE enables "remote-viewing" in Army research

When Elizabeth Mayer learned that the CIA funded research in the 1970s and 1980s into what is often called “remote-viewing,” she talked with Harold Puthoff, a physicist from Stanford who was hired by the CIA to coordinate the project. Puthoff told her about one of the remote viewers who was extremely successful:

“Joe McMoneagle passed his first remote-viewing tests with flying colors. At that point, he was asked to volunteer as remote reviewer #001 for the top-secret army project Grill Flame, eventually renamed Star Gate. McMoneagle remained associated with the project for the full eighteen years of the Army-initiated involvement, the only remote viewer to do so. In 1984, he was awarded the Legion of Merit by the US government for ‘distinguishing himself by exceptionally meritorious conduct in the performance of outstanding services during his Army career.’

McMoneagle, Puthoff says, would produce: “masses of data that were really hot and totally inexplicable by ordinary means. One example that had particular impact on me was when Joe identified that the Russians were building a new form of submarine. We gave Joe the geographic coordinates, and nothing else. His immediate response was that they identified a very cold wasteland with an extremely large industrial looking building that had enormous smokestacks, not far from the sea that was covered with a thick cap of ice. Since that first impression corresponded very closely to the photograph, we showed Joe the picture and asked what might be going on inside it. Here is McMoneagle’s own retrospective account of the viewing:

I spent some time relaxing and emptying my mind. Then with my eyes closed, I imagined myself drifting down into the building, passing downward through its roof. What I found was mind-blowing. The building was easily the size of two or three huge shopping centers, all under a single roof.

In giant bays were what looked like cigars of different sizes, sitting in gigantic racks. Thick mazes of scaffolding and interlocking steel pipes were everywhere. Within these were what appeared to be two large cylinders being welded side to side, and I had an overwhelming sense that this was a submarine, a really big one, with twin hulls.

What I didn’t know was that my session was reported back to the NSC and created some dissension. The almost unanimous belief at the time, by all the intelligence-collection agencies investigating the building, was that the Soviets were constructing a brand-new type of assault ship—a troop carrier, and possibly one with the helicopter capability. A submarine was out of the question.

On my second visit, I got up very close. Hovering beside it, I guessed it to be about twice the length of an American football field and nearly seventy feet in width, and at least six or seven floors high (if it were sitting next to a standard apartment building). It was clearly constructed of two huge elongated tubes running side-by-side for almost their entire length. (I didn’t think this was possible with submarines.) I moved up over the deck and was surprised to see that it had slanted missile tubes running side by side. This was critically important because this indicated that it had the capacity to fire while on the move rather than having to stand still in the water, which made it a very dangerous type of submarine.

After the session, I did a very detailed drawing of the submarine, adding dimensions, as well as noting the slanted tubes, indicating eighteen to twenty in all. This material, along with the typed transcript of my session was forwarded to the NSC. We soon received a follow-on request to return to the target and to try to provide an estimated time of completion. I revisited the site and, based on the speed of construction and the differences in the condition of the submarine from one session to the next, I guessed that it would be ready for launch about four months later—that would be sometime in the month of January—a singularly crazy time of year to launch a submarine from a building not connected to water, near a sea frozen over with ice yards thick. I reported that very soon a crew of bulldozers and other types of heavy equipment would arrive to cut a channel leading to the sea.

McMoneagle’s intuitive analysis was correct. In the words of Puthoff, “McMoneagle was one of our very few subjects whose ability to perceive places thousands of miles away was so reliable we could document it consistently and unequivocally.” [1]

Mayer didn’t know, or knew but didn’t mention in her book, that McMoneagle attributed his remote-viewing abilities to near-death experiences. In a book entitled Death Makes Life Possible: Revolutionary Insights on Living, Dying, and the Continuation of Consciousness, author Marilyn Schlitz quotes McMoneagle’s accounts of his NDEs:

“His first NDE occurred after McMoneagle became ill while eating in an Austrian restaurant. When I exited through the front door of the restaurant, there was a pop, like someone snapping their fingers, and I found myself standing on a cobblestone road. It was raining, and the rain was passing through my palms. I thought, ‘This is very peculiar.’ I looked over, and a body was half in and half out of this swinging door of the restaurant.

I noticed that it looked very much like my body. My friend who had brought my wife to the restaurant had come outside and pulled the body into his lap. He was striking the body on the chest with his fist; they didn’t know what CPR was in 1970. I found out later that I had gone into convulsions, collapsed, and had swallowed my tongue. His solution was to keep hitting me on the chest with his fist.

They loaded the body into a car and rushed me to a hospital in Passau, Germany. That took quite a while since it was about sixty kilometers away. By the time they got me to the hospital, I had not breathed for a while, and my heart had stopped. And I was watching them—I floated alongside the car. I watched them cut the clothing off in the emergency room and stick needles in my chest. I had drifted up to the ceiling in the out-of-body state. I felt heat on the back of my neck and thought it was those bright lights near the ceiling. I turned to look at the lights and fell over backwards into a tunnel, accelerated through the tunnel, and when I came out at the end, I was enveloped in this very warm, bright light.

Instantly, I knew all the answers to the universe. I knew that I was in the presence of God because that’s what it had to be. I was overwhelmed with love and peace. Then a voice said, ‘You can’t stay. You have to go back.’ I argued with it and said, ‘Nah, I’m not going anywhere.’ And then there was another pop. I sat up, and saw I was under a sheet naked.

I looked around, and there was a German lying in the bed next to me. I had been comatose about twenty-five hours. I was very excited and started telling him, ‘God’s a white light. You can’t die.’ He ran out and got the doctor who came in and sedated me.

I woke up a little later, and they were taking me to Munich to put me in a rest home where they would start doing brain studies. They were sure that I was crazy and that I’d suffered brain damage from the lack of oxygen. Over a two-week period, they were able to figure out that I’d not suffered any brain damage. However, I was unable to reconcile the events. I was having out-of-body experiences. I was hearing conversations going on four rooms away. I was reading people’s minds that were walking into the room. I was psychically scattered. And I’d totally lost my fear of death.

Eventually they let me out of the rest home, and I got to spend seven more years overseas doing some very strange jobs because I had no fear of death. For a long time, until 1985, I believe the white light is God, and that you can’t die, that you survive death.”

In 1985, after a massive heart attack, McMoneagle had a second NDE.  In the dying process, I was able to see the light, but not go to it. For some interesting reason, I can’t explain why, I was just not allowed to do it. But I could see the light, and I could see the light had edges. That created a huge philosophical problem for me because my definition of God is that God is an unlimited being, and an unlimited being can’t have edges.

After more than a year, McMoneagle concluded the light is what we are when we cease to be physical. I think we become, in a sense, an almost pure form of energy. And in this pure state of energy, we coalesce into all of the knowledge that we’ve collected in all of our forms, many of the lives that we’ve lived.

I believe in multiple lives, not recurrent lives. I don’t believe that we are born into lives in a linear format, but I think we live multiple lives simultaneously. So when we cease to be physical, all of those lives coalesce together; all of the knowledge comes together at one time. And the reason we assume the light to be God is because all of the knowledge coming together is so overwhelming we just assume that this must be what God is.

It’s the initial threshold of something that we call life after death, but it’s the leading edge of the loss of identity. The reason that we return from the near-death experience is a survival mechanism that says we can’t quite lose our identity. True life after death is a loss of identity. It’s a reintroduction into whatever the purest form of energy is, that all of creation or matter is made from.

My consciousness, McMoneagle continues, is scattered across space-time because space-time is an illusion. When I cease to be physical, when I die physically, I cease to be physical in all of those manifestations. All of that experience comes together simultaneously. Now, the reason for being physical is to collect knowledge, or to collect experience. If that’s true, you and I are having an experience now. Well, if that’s true, then the experience I’m having over here and you’re having there is pretty poor because I’m only getting half of it and you’re getting the other half. But what if in actuality, we’re both the same? Then we’re getting all of it. But we don’t know that until we cease to be physical.

In the physical sense, we don’t understand that, but we have to have the experience by playing out our roles. In other words, we’re incarnated in multiple lives in the physical. Through the death process, or the leaving of the physical, all physical reality ceases to be. All the manifestations cease to be simultaneously, and it’s all brought together into an understanding of the universe.

It’s important to understand that what I do to you, particularly in this moment, I’m doing to myself. That’s the critical understanding of it. So real karma is everything you do, you do to yourself. That’s the truest form of understanding. Everything I do to every living thing, I do to myself. [2]

1 Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer, Extraordinary Knowing: Science, Skepticism, and the Inexplicable Powers of the Human Mind (Bantam Books, 2007), 110-117. 

2 In Marilyn Schlitz, Death Makes Life Possible: Revolutionary Insights on Living, Dying, and the Continuation of Consciousness (Sounds True, 2015), 52-55.

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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).