CHAPTER FOUR
VISIONS AND OTHER PSYCHIC PHENOMENA

     One of the strangest stories that I heard when I first became involved with Rebirthing in 1978 was a story about one of the original Certified Rebirthers, Diane Hinterman.  She had been Rebirthing an elderly woman, a woman who was indeed so frail that Diane was anxious, afraid for a moment that the frail woman might injure herself doing the Rebirthing breath.  During that Rebirth, Diane suddenly saw a dark-skinned man wearing a dhoti standing on the other side of the woman Diane was Rebirthing.  Diane felt instantly reassured and continued to complete the Rebirthing. The personage in that vision later again appeared to her and told her that she should come to see Him.  She understood that He was Herakhan Baba, Babaji, the guru of Paramahansa Yogananda’s guru’s guru.
      When first I met Diane, I found myself instantly loving her and making a warm friend of her.  She seemed healthy and clear.  Yet I thought a great deal about such a strange thing happening to her.  I didn’t want to deny its reality; I didn’t want to insinuate that it was some kind of an hallucination on her part; I certainly didn’t think she was lying.  But, it didn’t make sense.
     I heard later on that a similar happening occurred while Leonard was Rebirthing himself in his bathtub in upstate New York.  A dark-skinned person appeared to Leonard and asked him why he didn’t come to India to see Him.
     I don’t know how either Diane or Leonard identified who appeared as visions to them.  Maybe that personage who was being envisioned gave them His name, for all I know.  In any case, I know that they reported seeing someone else in the room with them during Rebirths.
     I wondered about their visions.
     Of course, once you know that other people have done something, you tend to want to do the same thing yourself when you’re doing the same thing they were doing.  So lots of people who do the conscious connected breath, the Rebirthing breath, say they see visions.  And who is to say whether they are seeing such visions in and of themselves or whether they are believing that they must see visions and so they are conjuring them up?  Anyhow, how can anyone tell the difference between a vision and something that’s being imagined?  I would imagine that all visions seem totally real to the person seeing them.  Probably the only reason we don’t claim to see them more often is that we wait to receive clues from others about what is being consensually perceived, and then we allow ourselves to “see” what others are “seeing.”
     Claims of visions which aren’t consensually validated, of course, remain suspect.  They may be happening.  They may not.  They also might be a kind of hysteria, a kind of response to suggestion and expectation.  Since, in any case, they can’t be verified, they may even be the resort of somebody who seeks more attention than he or she has been getting.  So who knows?  But for those of you who are “vision freaks,” let me tell about some other visions seen by people that I have Rebirthed.
     I never saw the people envisioned, myself, but several times people I was Rebirthing have reported to me that they were seeing Herakhan Baba, “my” Babaji, in the room with us.  Twice, too, people I’ve been Rebirthing have told me that they opened their eyes to see Paramahansa Yogananda standing there in the Rebirthing room!  Strange to me is that these people weren’t even devotees of Herakhan Baba or of Yogananda or members of the Self Realization Fellowship, the Yogic organization founded and led by Yogananda.
     One time the person I was Rebirthing said he saw someone in the Rebirthing room  wearing a uniform with a certain number of rows of buttons down the front; the person in the vision had dark-brown complexion and very dark brown eyes, very compassionate eyes.    My Rebirthee said that he’d never seen that person before and didn’t know who he was.  I thought perhaps he, too, was “seeing” Yogananda, so I went back to the music room which is where I keep all of my spiritual, esoteric, metaphysical books (other than the books on Rebirthing which are kept in my Rebirthing room), and I pulled out The Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda.  I showed the person I was Rebirthing one of the pictures of Yoganandaji when He lived here in Los Angeles and founded the Self Realization Fellowship.  But my Rebirthee ignored that picture while grabbing the book out of my hands, saying, “You just passed it, you just passed the picture of the person I saw!”
     Then he located a picture of Yogananda as a young school boy, wearing His school uniform with buttons in rows down the front.
     The person I was Rebirthing never had read that book, knew nothing about Yoganandaji or about the Self Realization Fellowship, had never gone to the Lake Shrine, and had never ever heard of the whole idea of Kriya Yoga!
            What to make of it?  Who knows?
     Rebirthing has definitely brought “esoterica” into my life, both as a consequence of the metaphysical and spiritual backgrounds of many Rebirthers and clients I’ve met, and also as direct experiences I’ve had while Rebirthing.  Such esoteric experiences include not only spoon-bending and psychokinesis, but also clairvoyance and fire-walking.
     One such experience happened during my second or third trip to Campbell Hot Springs.  I was in the basement of the main lodge building, being Rebirthed by my friend Tim Torian.  As I was breathing, eyes closed, I was distracted by “seeing” a very, very clear image of two people, both strangers, though I felt I “knew” their names.  I told Tim their names and described what they were wearing.  I also told him they were very near, in fact, right above us, possibly upstairs in the main room of the lodge.  Then I turned my attention back to my breathing.
      After, I completed my Rebirth, I went upstairs for the post-Rebirth get- together during which everybody shares their experiences.  As we were all talking about what had happened with us while we were doing our breathing sessions, two people came in.  They were the very people I had seen!  They were dressed the way I had seen them, and, most strangely of all, their names were the names I had told to Tim!
     It turned out that they had arrived at Campbell Hot Springs shortly after the time when we had all dispersed to do our Rebirths with each other.  Meeting Leonard, they were told that they had to go get Rebirthed before they could join the workshop, so they had gone on the porch of the lodge almost directly above the basement where I was being Rebirthed by Tim, and they had traded Rebirths with each other.
            How can I explain my “vision” of them?
     Of course, it’s possible that my hearing is so sensitive that I overheard them call each other by name.  But how can I explain being able to “see” how they were dressed?  I’m forced to just chalk this up as either an amazing coincidence or else as a pure-and-simple case of clairvoyance.
     A very impressive and equally inexplicable event involved a photograph I saw during my second trip to India.  I had gone to Jaipur to spend a day or two with the family of the people who owned Anjali House, a tourist home in New Delhi that I had stayed at during my first trip.  The father, Mr. Joshi, wanted me to look at a Polaroid picture that a friend of his had taken of Babaji during a trip He had made a few years earlier to Mr. Joshi’s house in Jaipur.
     When I looked at it, what I saw was Babaji looking straight forward and also looking to the left in profile and also looking to the right in profile, so that the photo itself looked very much like many Hindu statues which show Shiva with three faces.  
     I assumed it was a clever superimposition of three photos, so I wasn’t especially impressed by the photo as such.  But the story Mr. Joshi told me about it was amazing.
     He told me he had a friend who had had an immense amount of contempt for him because of his affection and connection with Herakhan Baba, Babaji.  That friend, hearing that Babaji was visiting Jaipur and was coming to stay at Mr. Joshi’s house, came over to see Him, very skeptical, not at all reverent.  Babaji told Mr. Joshi to tell his friend that Babaji wanted him to come back with a camera so that he could take a picture of Him.
      So, the man went and got his Polaroid camera.  When he came back, Babaji sat there looking straight at him and asked him to take a photo.  The man clicked the release button on his camera.  And the photo that I saw was that photo!  It was not a superimposition of three different photos.  It was one photo of Babaji with three heads!
      How could it have happened?  Was He turning His head so quickly that He actually beat the rate of speed of light, and impressed His image in all three positions on that Polaroid film?
     The skeptic who took the photo, by the way, was so impressed, not only by the three faces of “Shiva” on his film, but by the fact that Babaji put on such an impressive demonstration presumably to win his heart and the mind, that that man became a sincere devotee of Babaji and remains so to this day.  Babaji’s camera “trick” with him was as effective in winning a new devotee as His “trick” with my camera that I describe in Chapter Six was to be with me.
     Another experience of apparent psychokinesis took place when I returned to England from my second trip to India.  Because I was working every day, including weekends, I spent a great deal of time with the people who had organized for me there in London: Toni Tye (the very first Rebirther in all of Great Britain) and her husband, Lee (Aire) Preisler, Ronald Fuchs and Diane Roberts.  We all got off on each other’s energy, and I believe that the time I spent there on that particular trip to England comprised some of the highest, most exuberant, spiritually clear times of my life.  Some especially magical events transpired then, too.
     After several weeks of working every day, we all finally had a day free.  Ronald and Diane decided to spend the day with their daughter, but Toni and Aire borrowed a car from their friend, Ben Bartel, and we all decided to take a trip to Stonehenge and to Salisbury Cathedral, and, if possible, up to Coventry Cathedral as well.
      After a sumptuous, leisurely breakfast, we finally left, an hour after we said we would.  Ben had brought a picnic lunch and did the driving, so Toni and Aire and Louis and I relaxed and just enjoyed seeing the countryside.
      Toni told a marvelous story of a dream that she had had the night before.  In the dream she was standing on the feet of Babaji with her back against Him, as He stood up behind her with His arms on her shoulders.  She was moving through the ordinary events of a usual day of hers, but she was seeing everything with the eyes of Babaji who was steering her to look at this and to look at that.
     What a beautiful dream it is, isn’t it?  How marvelous to feel so certainly that Babaji is there to support and guide and direct and protect, and that she was seeing the world with the eyes of God, looking at the same world that the eyes of God are looking at!
     So her dream got us all in a fine mood.
    When we reached Stonehenge, I found, much to my dismay, that the circle of megaliths had been fenced in and we could only walk up to the fencing and look through the wire to see the circle of megaliths.  I was very disappointed, because I had very fond memories of having been there twenty years earlier with my three daughters, when my youngest daughter was only six, spending a warm afternoon almost totally alone amidst the stones.  I remember trying to understand what my feelings were up there on that solitary plain with the wind blowing through the stones.  I felt amazement, but not awe.  Indeed, the most beautiful image I recall from that day was of a woman sitting and nursing her child in the shadow of one of the megaliths.
     Well, when I found Stonehenge was now enclosed, I must have made some sound of disappointment.  One of the guards came over and asked, “Have you been here before?  Have you come a long way?  I bet you’re American.”
     We introduced ourselves and I told him that yes, I had been there before, when it was still open from the road.  He explained that it had been closed off because people were beginning to put graffiti on the stones, so now it was a you-can-look but you-can’t-touch kind of place.  I asked him if we couldn’t please just run into the center of the circle to take one photo, and we joked about how I would be happy to take photos of him, of course, as well.  And so, pointing to Louis and me, he said, “Yeah, go on, the two of you can go right out to the middle of the circle.  If one of the other fellows comes up to make you leave, you don’t need to tell them my name.  Just say that you thought that the guard over here told you that it would be OK to do that.”
     So, Louis and I had the pleasure of running out into the center of the circle, where we took pictures in all four directions, and then ran back to Toni, Ben, and Aire just as two other guards from other portions of the perimeter started to come over to us.  Dozens of other tourists who were also shocked started yelling at us.
     There’s nothing miraculous about that episode at all.  But it was really nice that this Brit, whose job depended on his keeping idiots like me from running out into the grass between the stones, permitted us to do exactly that!  I took marvelous pictures of the beautiful sky and fluffy white clouds over Salisbury Plain, beyond the henge that day, and also took some of our kind guard.  I had a lot of fun sending him the picture later on, along with a good-sized tip for having let us take those photos.
     After we left Stonehenge, we went on up to Salisbury Cathedral, found a parking space in one of the car parks (as they’re called by all jolly olde Brits) and then left to go to the cathedral.  We all wrote down the location of the parking space so we wouldn’t forget it.
     The first sight of Salisbury Cathedral was breathtaking.  The spires of Salisbury Cathedral seemed to pierce the fluffy white clouds that were scudding across the vivid, intensely blue sky that blustery spring day.  Hawthornes were in bloom, as were the daffodils.  
     The cathedral was very crowded, so after trying at first to stay together, we separated and agreed to meet back at the car park in an hour and a half.
     The noontime service appeared to be over, but something else was still going on.  At a long table that was set up in front of the altar in the main hall of the cathedral there was a large group comprised of Anglican clergymen.  A person next to me explained they were mostly clergymen of high station, bishops and archbishops, from all of the cathedrals throughout Great Britain.  It was a lovely sight to see all these different ministers in their different raiments.  There wasn’t a great deal of uniformity, one clergyman to the next, although they all seemed to wear mostly very dark maroon, almost the color that I’ve seen the Dalai Lama and His followers wear.  The Anglican clergymen’s maroon costumes varied in style from elaborate and ornate vestments for some of the older clergy to a backwards-collared maroon T-shirt on top of a pair of ordinary blue denim jeans for one of the younger members of the group.
      As we walked into the cathedral, the panel of clergymen was just finishing whatever their conference had been about, and after everyone sang a hymn I didn’t recognize, the leader, an archbishop, I believe, opened the discussion to questions from members of the audience sitting in the cathedral. I thought the questions would be theological in nature, so the first one was very unexpected.  A pre-teen girl inquired in a high voice, “How many windpipes does that organ have?”
      The clergyman moderating the meeting seemed taken aback momentarily, but then laughed and said, “Well, I don’t know how many windpipes there are in that organ, but I can tell you how many windbags there are up on the stage with me,” as he turned around and pretended to count each and every one of the ministers.
     I thought it was cute to hear an archbishop poke fun at his colleagues, his fellow clergy.
     Still, of course, that wasn’t at all miraculous.  But afterwards, the freaky stuff happened.  When Louis and I left the church, we realized that we were running late.  Concerns about punctuality have always had a great deal of charge for me, probably because time must have been a major consideration when I was spending three days getting born.  I suppose by the time I finally appeared, everyone was heartily sick and tired of me.  And there might very well have been a few who were almost hoping that I would drop dead, anything, just to stop the waiting and struggle.  Maybe the same thing even happened at my birth as happened at the birth of my first child, who arrived after I had been in labor for 26 hours.  I was all alone when her head emerged right there on the hospital bed.  It was great that I was the first person to touch my first child—but it was confusing, too.  It might have been easier if I hadn’t been left all alone by my husband and the doctor, however fed up they were with waiting for so long.
      Anyhow, Louis and I couldn’t locate Ben or Toni or Aire in the crowd, so we left the cathedral grounds and walked very briskly down the winding road from the cathedral to the car park.  
     When we reached the spot where the car had been parked, it wasn’t there!
      What a marvelous opportunity that was for me to go through all of my old negatives about being abandoned, as well as about taking too long to get some place and worrying that people wouldn’t wait for me!  
      In great tension, I burst into tears right there in the car park.  Louis tried to convince me we hadn’t been left behind.  He pointed out that, after all, our companions were the very people who were taking care of us.  We were the stars of the show they were producing.  He suggested they had probably simply moved the car or gone off to get something and they would be back in a while.  But a quick search of the car park didn’t locate the car and a wait of a quarter hour didn’t result in their appearance.
      I decided, since we had last seen them on the opposite side of the cathedral during the finish of the service, that we should go back to the cathedral itself.  I put a note on the post near the empty parking space explaining that we had been there and would come back in half an hour, then we hurried up the winding single road that led the half mile or so from the car park to the cathedral.  We went all the way around through the now almost empty cathedral itself, and even went to all the various little houses and buildings attached to the cloisters nearby, but we still didn’t find Ben or Toni or Aire.
     So, in increasing trepidation, we went back to the car park.  Hurray!  Toni and Aire were there, both frantic, apparently convinced that Ben and Louis and I had left.  They hadn’t noticed my note although it was still on the post next to the empty parking space.  After another search, we found the car.  Ben still wasn’t there, but at least the car now was back, though still not where it had been left originally.  It had definitely been moved!
     We figured that Ben must have been taking the car for a quick little spin somewhere when Louis and I first returned to find the car gone to leave our note, and that Ben had then found a different parking space when he returned.  We assumed he had read my note saying Louis and I were going back to the cathedral and had then gone back, too.
     So, once more, we all climbed back up the road again to the cathedral.  We still couldn’t find Ben, so we once again returned to the car park.  No luck.  No Ben.  Finally, on our fourth trip up to the cathedral to look for him, we found Ben. 
     It turned out that he had spent the entire time up at Salisbury Cathedral itself, looking for us there, and had never gone to the car park!
     I can’t explain how the car moved.  But, we all benefitted from this mysterious translocation.  If the car had stayed where we parked it in the first place, I wouldn’t have had an opportunity to go through all my abandonment stuff, and, I might add, Ben, Toni, Aire, and Louis would also not have had their opportunities to run through their numbers as well.
     That wasn’t the end of magic for that day, though.  We left Salisbury after eating our lunch in the car park, and went on to Coventry Cathedral.  Then, on our way back to London, we got lost.  (Apparently being lost wasn’t to be an uncommon occurrence with this particular bunch of us.)  As we were going down a country lane, hoping to be able to pick up one of the major roads leading back to London, we came, instead, to the end of the road!  To our right was a garden, perhaps fifty foot across and twenty foot deep, covered with all sorts of blooming plants.  In addition, every piece of bare ground between the plants was filled by some kind of whimsical statue or contraption: elves, dwarfs, leprechauns, fairies, geese, bunnies, windmills, and other little figurines of everything anyone has ever used to illustrate a children’s novel, all hidden amongst the grass and the low shrubs.  We were all enchanted by this little fairyland and I took several pictures of it.
     As we tried to turn around on the narrow road, we got ourselves stuck on what Brits call a verge (what we here in the USA call a soft shoulder or a low ditch).
     Right near the edge of the garden there was a large stretch of cultivated farmland.  So, while the fellows struggled to push the car out, I walked across the road to a pigpen in which there was a pig that was huge—he must have been at least six or eight feet long, and maybe three or four feet thick through!  I’d never seen a pig up close, and I was appalled to watch him standing over a pile of steaming garbage, snorting and snuffling, as he was eating the food that he also was urinating and defecating upon.  I used up my last shots taking pictures of him.
     Even if I weren’t mainly a vegetarian, I don’t think I could ever have eaten bacon or pork or ham after that!  I found myself having to come to terms with the idea that a pig is really not a clean animal.  It eats crap, and however delicious its flesh may be, it probably isn’t right and good and healthy to eat it.  I imagine the flesh of scavengers is even “worse” than that of predators.
            Anyway, eventually the owner of the garden and the farm came out and gave us directions that allowed us to get back to a main road.  We located a store where I bought more film for my camera, then we tried to retrace our steps back to that garden so I could take more pictures of the figurines.  But it wasn’t there!  Not the farm.  Not the pig.  Not the garden.  Not the figurines.  We had the correct road, but the whole previous scene was absent!  All that proved we were there were my few hastily snapped photos!
            After an hour spent driving up and down that road trying to locate the farm, we realized we were thirsty, so we went to a very picturesque pub we saw on the road (the first pub I had ever gone to).  The pub was part of an old mill that still had a working water wheel.  It turned out to lie at the intersection of several ley lines of power.  Such lines are believed to encircle the earth, much as meridians are supposed to be lines of power running the length of the human body.
     Maybe it all transpired that way because we were near ley lines.
     That pub was, so far as I know, my first encounter with ley lines.  Since then, I’ve gone to numerous places on the face of the earth where such lines of power are said to be intersecting.  One of the most fascinating of such experiences was in Poland, in Krakov Cathedral, where one particular spot in the corner of a wall is supposed to be such a power point.  
     I watched a man standing in that corner with eyes closed for at least fifteen or twenty minutes, essentially motionless.  In front of him, covered by some of his clothing, stood a little girl who was as silent and motionless as he was.
     I have always wondered what they were doing while standing there.  Was he waiting to get something?  Or was he getting something?  I just don’t know.
     Another encounter with power points was in Glasgow, where I led a workshop that concluded with an outdoor group Rebirth held at the top of a hill within a circle of oaks said to remain from the days of the Druids. 
     I do know I didn’t get any magic energies there or at that pub in England or at any of the ley line, power point places that I’ve been to.  To date, I have not had a single tingle from any of such experiences.  I’ve never felt any changes of any kind from them, although I have, of course, been blown away mentally by watching what people do at such places.
     I don’t think that’s because I’m insensitive.  I certainly do seem to be capable of feeling awe, as when I first went into Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris.  I’ve had many other experiences where I felt some prescience of some kind, where I felt tuned in on the “vibes” of the place.  But all of that notwithstanding, to date, I have never yet felt anything when I’ve put myself at an intersection of ley lines, just as I also have never felt anything when I have experienced Reiki practitioners, even some of the leading Reiki masters.
       By comparison, I have felt other energy transfers.  For example, one of the highest times in my life was when I was with Arthur Lincoln Pauls, the innovator of a modern bodywork form called Orthobionomy.  Arthur had just finished a hands-on Orthobionomy session on me, which ended with what he called aura-cleansing.  I had my eyes closed, so I didn’t know what was happening, but I felt a most intense rise and flooding of energy throughout my body, similar to my experience with Babaji that I will later describe in Chapter Seven.  I was very surprised to open my eyes and find Arthur moving his hands through the air a foot above me.  with each sweep, I felt a surge of energy rushing through me.  It all ended when I laughed, Arthur opened his eyes, and stopped the session after saying to me, “My, you have the thickest aura I’ve ever felt.”
     I still don’t know if that’s good or bad—he wouldn’t tell me.
     Although I have never felt any energy changes in association with ley lines or with other hands-on kinds of so-called healing experiences, I have done other things which one isn’t supposed to be able to do unless one’s mind is clear and in a high spiritual state, for example, the Tony Robbins firewalk, which I did.  But I know I didn’t follow Tony’s directions in order to walk the fire.
     One of Tony’s first directions at the beginning of the evening was that we should think of a time when we were totally happy.  I started to think of times when I was happy, but each time I thought of such a time, I also thought of what had happened afterwards, how this love turned into rage and impatience and deserting one another, and how that excitement and joy turned into burden, etc., etc.  Going back as far as I could, I couldn’t remember a single time when I had been completely happy without that memory being instantly corrupted by my later knowledge of how that time didn’t persist.  
     So, of course, all of this plunged me into a state of emotional despair, and I started weeping right there amidst the four hundred or so people who were attending that particular firewalk.  (It didn’t matter.  Other people were also weeping about things.  It was a time of high emotional excitement.)  But, in any case, through the whole evening, I wasn’t able to do any of the exercises Tony told us to do.  I tried, but I kept being hung up by other memories that kept submerging the ones that I was supposed to be remembering in order to get myself higher and higher.  
     At the very end of the lecture part of the evening, Tony told us all to take off our shoes and stockings, and then to stretch out on the floor of the conference room while he read us some directions.  Well, by the time I got my shoes untied, and my stockings taken off, I couldn’t find any place to lie down.  I finally ended up squeezing in a twisting kind of way across the floor between two rows of chairs, putting my head under one chair and getting my legs tucked under another chair in the row in front of where I had been sitting.  My head was jammed up against some man’s feet, and they were probably the smelliest feet I’d ever encountered.
     So, whatever it was that Tony was saying very, very, very rapidly, passed right by me.  I don’t know what he said.  I wasn’t concentrating on him because I was trying hard to catch a breath without being overwhelmed by the smell of those feet.
     Then, finally, deliverance was at hand.  Tony finally stopped droning on and on and said, “OK, everybody get up.  We’re going to go across the street to the fire pits.”
     I certainly didn’t expect to walk the fire, not because of fear, but because I knew I hadn’t done any of the mental exercises that he had directed us to do to get ourselves in a state so that we could handle the firewalk.  But I went along, at least to watch.  Barefooted, I stumbled and picked my way across the street over to the large hotel parking lot where the 12-foot-long fire pit had been dug and was filled with burning coals.  
     The first person who walked across the fire was Tony Robbins.  Right after him came his wife, the woman he had married only the week before that particular evening.  Then came the center manager for the Los Angeles center producing this weekend event.  Then another one of the center managers walked the coals.
     And then, somehow, there was Louis getting in line and walking across the coals!
      And I was just behind him.  After he was across, some woman grabbed my arm and asked, “Are you ready to walk?”
     Startled, I exclaimed, “You’re not going to let me walk, are you?”
     She answered, “Well, that’s what you came here for, isn’t it?”
            I said, “Yes!”
      And she said, “Well, then, go for it.”
      And so I did.  I wasn’t filled with fervor.  I didn’t have any images of cool moss or waterfalls.  I wasn’t concerned about safety.  I wasn’t concerned about anything except possibly tripping and falling full length on the coals.  I was just absolutely surprised.  I was surprised that they let me do it.  I was surprised that I did it!  But I’m still not sure my state of mind is what enabled me to do it.
     There’s some relationship, I’m sure, between a state of high spiritual perfection and the ability to transform reality so as to walk on fire without getting burned or to levitate or to heal instantly so that you can pierce yourself with a saber and then not have any blood show—that kind of stuff.
            But I don’t know if there’s a single and direct relationship, that you must be spiritually high in order to do these things.  I don’t know about that.  I wish I did.  I like the thought that we all heal in each other’s presence.
            Sometimes I find myself wondering what it is that marks the difference between me and other people I know who have had visions, messages, etc.  Is it that I’m simply insensitive to cues in my environment that otherwise might be noticed by someone who is more spiritually attuned?  Am I missing the regular messages that God sends me?
     Does God, does Babaji, only send messages to people who have more faith than I do?  My stance is one of pure agnosticism: I don’t “know.”
     Furthermore, I don’t know how I would “know,” I don’t know what would mark “knowledge” of things which are not real and material.
     So I remain surprised, engaged, captivated, puzzled, bemused, even confused, but never sure.  Neither of Yes nor of No.
     But I’m not an atheist, as, for example, my uncle and my older sister are.  They have no hesitation in saying that there is no God, that it’s ridiculous to think that there is such a thing as God or such a being as God.  They are certain.  They are pure-and-simple materialists, atheists.  They believe that the entire construct of God is a pure projection of infantile need on the part of the individuals who comprise the particular society that shares that view of God.
     But I remain an agnostic.  I wish I did “know.”  I wish I believed certainly that there is not or certainly that there is.
     Meanwhile, as I walk around, I see “signs.”  And signs do abound.  Every time I lie in my hot tub and look up and see one particular star, I’m reminded of Babaji.  My mind instantly goes back to scenes of interactions with Him.  I think that star is a sign.  Every single cloud-free night, it’s as if Babaji is showing me that He is there for me to think about.
     But such “signs” are far from being the kinds of visions seen by many other people I know.  For example, Joanne Hongslo told me that once she was walking across the Golden Gate Bridge, as she liked to do every morning on her way to work, and suddenly, there was Babaji standing on the sidewalk in front of her, asking her, “Why you no come to see me?”
     It was at that point that she decided to go to India to see Babaji, and started saving money so that she could have enough for the trip and for presents for Babaji.
     Now that’s a very clear vision.  From her way of describing it, the individual who stood in front of her on the sidewalk on the bridge was real, three-dimensional flesh—not a vision in the sense of an ephemeral thought, an image—but indeed a reality.  Just as, for example, the brown individual who appeared to Diane Hinterman in her early days as a Rebirther also seemed real and material to her, not just a phantasmagoric thought that she was trying to superimplant upon the apparent reality around her.
     But who can tell what set and setting create out of ostensible reality?
     I well remember the time when I had one of my clearest lessons in the effect of the mind and the effect of set and setting.  It was late at night, and I had just finished working for four or five hours after dinner and after the children were in bed.  I was sitting in my living room, and I had just lit a joint and started to relax, looking across the length of the living room into the dining room, at the vase holding flowers that sat in the middle of the dining room table.  It is a blue pottery vase (on the table still today as I’m writing this) and it has, to me, a very satisfying fat belly shape, Colonial in type, although it is a modern piece of pottery.  As I looked at it, I suddenly was struck with an immense fear.  The vase had disappeared and, instead, what I saw was a detached human hand holding up the head of a monkey or an ape, dripping blood!
            I was so frightened as I looked at it that I turned my head away and closed my eyes and almost panted in my anxiety, sitting there at the sofa.
      I thought about my fear and my apparent hallucination (not drug-related for I had only lit the joint—like President Clinton, I hadn’t yet inhaled).  I reasoned that anything that I think is “out there” is something which is already in my mind.  It’s my thought.  It’s my thought.  It’s my thought.  Not reality.
     As I thought that, I thought, well, I surely don’t need to be afraid of decapitated primates dripping blood on my dining room table.  At that point, I opened my eyes and looked back again, only slightly fearfully.
     This time, sitting in the middle of the dining room table, still constructed out of the vase and the flowers that were in it, was an entirely different pattern of light and shadow.  This time what I saw was the head of the Madonna holding the Babe.  That fearful image had changed into one of radiant peace, joy, and love!
     In that instant, I realized all I ever have to do to change my reality is change the way I’m looking at it.
      What is perfect about what is?  That’s always the injunction placed upon me.  I must find it.  The minute I find what that perfection is, reality itself becomes transformed into a very clear depiction of that perfection.
     As I started to say earlier, I do like the idea that we are each of us here helping the next and ourselves heal ourselves, that we heal one another, that everything that we do is an opportunity for us to change our minds about some old deep-seated negative.  I have found that some people are more evocative than others.  People that I feel very close to have a very decided capacity to be involved with me in the materialization of an old negative.
     For example, I believe that having the car mysteriously switch from one place in the car park to another, enabling me to run into my fear of abandonment, wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t been with Toni and Aire and Ben.  Other times when I’ve been with them have also involved my coming up hard against my old, old fear of being lost and abandoned.
     One of those times was when the entire training I was leading at Manjushri Institute in Ulverston, Cumbria, decided to take an afternoon off.  Many of us wanted to go to nearby Windemere, where Hawthorne wrote and where he is buried in the churchyard of the church where he was a minister.  It’s a beautiful little town.  We had a very large van and it was a lovely ride.
     We got to the assembly hall of the church just in time to have hot cocoa and bread and butter before it unexpectedly started to blizzard.  By the time I left the church to go outside to take pictures of the tombstones, including Hawthorne’s, several inches of snow had already fallen.  The Celtic crosses of the tombstones were altered by the way the snow settled so that, instead of looking like crosses, they actually looked simply like jack o’ lanterns.  I took many pictures and I greatly enjoy looking at my photos of these smiling faces on the tombstones behind that dour gray church in the middle of the Lake District.  They looked like they were making a mockery both of death and of greatness.
     Because it was blizzarding so hard and getting more and more strong and blustery, we all decided to forego going around the shops and sights of the city of Windemere.  Instead, we got back into the van, to try to return to Manjushri in time for supper. 
     By the time we had gone just a few blocks, the snow on the ground was close to six inches deep, and it was almost impossible to see out of the window of the van.  A couple of large busses had slipped on the road and were now broadside to the flow of traffic, resulting in a complete stop of all traffic flow.
     I longed to walk in the snow because that’s a pleasure which a person living in Los Angeles doesn’t have very often.  I thought, OK, I’ll get out and walk until traffic starts flowing again, and when I see the van driving by, I’ll hop back on.  That was agreed upon.  And so I got out of the van, with Louis right behind me.  Then Tony and Aire got out, and then Ronald and Diane got out.
     I could see each couple getting out of the van, but as Louis and I started to walk away, within a matter of perhaps ten feet at the most, I lost sight of the other couples and, soon after, Louis was lost to my sight as well.  I wasn’t frightened.  I was truly enjoying myself walking alone down the sidewalk in the thick snow, in this little town with its major road being about one and a half car lanes wide by USA standards.  I enjoyed myself looking in shop windows until it suddenly dawned on me that traffic was once again flowing and that approximately twenty minutes had passed but I had not yet seen the van go by me.  So I thought I had better turn around and go back up the road toward where the van was supposed to be in the slowly moving traffic.
     I passed the previously stalled busses as I walked all the way back to the bridge where I had last seen the van, but hunt though I did, I could not see it through the falling snow.  I felt panicked that it had passed me without my seeing it.  And without my being seen.  Once again, I was in the throws of my fear that I was abandoned.  I hurried to walk back up to the busses creeping along, trying to find the van, with no success.  The van simply wasn’t in the line of traffic now flowing by in the few feet ahead of myself I could see through the thick, swirling snowfall.
     It was now very close to 6:00 P.M., and all the tiny stores that were dotted along the high road were closing.  I walked into one just to get warm and asked if they could tell me how to find the police station where I hoped I could get help getting back to Manjushri.  The woman closing her shop gave me directions, and then, just as I started to walk out of the store, I ran into Louis, who looked almost as frenzied and frantic and lost as I felt.  What a relief to have at least found each other.
     The two of us decided together that we would once again walk back up toward the bridge where the busses had slid, stopping the traffic.  We would once more look for the van.  If we didn’t run into it, we would go to the police station and try to get a taxi or something that would drive us from Windemere to Ulverston, the city right near Manjushri Institute.  We walked and didn’t see the van.  
     Suddenly, just where we stood, the snow stopped falling.  We were right underneath a street light post with the light shining.  There was an area of about ten foot of clear space around us with no snow falling through it.  In that instant three things occurred.  
     First, the van came up from my left.  It turned out that it had never moved in all the time that we had been gone from it!  Once the busses had started to move, the van had had some difficulties in getting up the incline, so it had been stuck at the bottom of the hill leading to the bridge.  It had only just then finally got itself going and was just driving by when we saw it clearly under the street light!
      Second, just as I turned to Louis to say, “There’s the van,” Toni and Aire came up from behind us in the circle of light.  And third, Ronald and Diane came from in front of us!
      Without any delay, all six of us smoothly got back on the van as if nothing had happened.  The people still in the van had never even waited for us.  All that had happened was that each of us had once again been given an opportunity to confront our issues of fear about being self-determined and of stepping out, doing what we wanted to do, in conflict with our need to feel that we belonged and were protected, but confined.  

Current chapter:
APPENDIX A

Previous chapters:
INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN