I'm on my third read-through of a book called
Extraordinary Knowing by Elizabeth Lloyd Meyer, Ph.D., which I stumbled over at the library a couple of weeks ago. Meyer was a noted psychoanalyst (she died right after the book was completed) who viewed the world through a scientist's eyes until she had a strange experience - what she calls an anomalous event. Her daughter's antique harp was stolen from the back of a theater in San Francisco. After two months of fruitless police investigation, a friend of Meyer's suggested she contact a dowser. "You mean one of those weirdos who walk around a field with a sapling?" "They can find other things besides water, you know." So she had a what-the-hell moment and called the president of the American Dowsing Association. The man, who lived in Kentucky, heard the story and said, "Okay, the harp is in Oakland - please send me a street map." Meyer complied, and a few days later the dowser called and said, "The harp is located near the corner of Fifth and Jackson streets." Meyer had never heard of that corner, but she drove out there, looked around, had another what-the-hell moment, and posted some fliers on the corner which said she was missing a harp. A couple days later, a man called her and said to meet her in a parking lot; she did; and he handed the harp over to Meyer - no explanations, no questions. As Meyer drove home, she said to herself, "This changes everything."
The harp incident made Meyer quite uncomfortable. It flew in the face of everything she knew scientifically about the world. After a number of sleepless nights, she decided to look into the various research that had been done over the years to prove whether extraordinary knowing really exists, and if so, what/where does it come from. And so her odyssey began.
It took Meyer awhile to admit her experience to other scientist friends, but as she haltingly told the story, she found that most other scientists, especially those who worked in a clinical setting with patients, had experienced similar events themselves, but had kept them secret for fear they would be ridiculed. It was like opening the floodgates to a torrent of anecdotes (anecdotal information being dismissed in the scientific world as so much crap).
One of her patients, a brilliant neurosurgeon who suffered from migraines, admitted that he stopped teaching because he felt he couldn't teach the real reason he had such an astounding success rate. When Meyer revealed her harp experience to him, the neurosurgeon haltingly admitted that he owed his near-perfect patient survival rate to the fact that he sat next to each patient in the hospital room, sometimes for just a few minutes and sometimes for hours, until he saw a white halo of light form around the patient's head, after which he "knew" that the patient would be healed and survive the surgery. And he was never wrong. How could he teach other surgeons, he said, if it all boiled down to this weird halo thing?
Meyer started reviewing the research into these anomolous occurences and discovered that much of the experimental data was scrupulously obtained - double-blind and triple-blind experiments, carefully constructed, meticulously carried out, and accurately reported - but peer reviewers still couldn't accept the results obtained. "The experiment was perfectly crafted and conducted, but I cannot accept the results," went a typical statement. The results just didn't jibe with what scientists understood to be the very parameters of existence as they knew it to be.
Meyer describes an experiment carried out which sought to see if prayer could effect pregnancy rates. A fertility clinic in South Korea took polaroids of each woman who came to the clinic requesting help with their fertility (the women weren't told they were part of an experiment). All of the pictures were sent to a go-between in the US. The go-between divided the pictures randomly into two groups; one group was sent to a Lutheran prayer circle in Oklahoma with the instructions to pray for these women to get pregnant; the other group of photos were just stored away. Six months later, data was collected regarding whether all of the women had conceived. The rate of conception of the prayered-for group of women was many times the rate of conception of the control group. The odds were something like ten million to one that there would be such a different rate of conception. By the way, this experiment was repeated with Catholics, Jews, Muslims, and non-denominational groups doing the praying, and the results were identical.
If you're like me, you scoff at this sort of thing, yet there's a part of me that says, "Aha, I feel like this could be true." I'm one of those people who won't quite believe in ESP, for example, until I see it for myself. But Meyers makes an interesting point - maybe instead of saying, "Seeing is believing," it might be more accurate to say, "Believing is seeing." In other words, if you believe that there are such things as extraordinary occurences, you're more apt to see them than someone who doesn't believe.
I've posted about my year in Palm Springs where I read Tarot for one of those psychic lines (floating in the pool, I'd deal the cards on the pool deck and sip iced tea while speaking on a cordless headset to the hundreds of people who called in). Sometimes the readings were flat - I would know it when the cards were dealt; but sometimes I'd get a little shiver as the cards were being shuffled and I'd think, "Well this one might be good," it was just a sense that a window was open - and sure enough, those readings were usually awesome. I mean freaky awesome. I'd stare off into space and images, words, faces, all sorts of things would appear to me. The customer would be blown away, and sometimes I'd get a call a week or two later confirming something I had said. As I'd be conducting these readings the information was clear; afterward, I wouldn't quite remember what I'd said, sort of like the experience of waking up from a dream and even as you grasp to remember the details, they just float away from you like smoke.
When I first started doing Tarot, I chalked it up to the enormous amount of information I could glean from a customer just from the few minutes of chat that preceded the reading. I mean, people are amazingly alike in certain fundamental ways, and it wasn't such a stretch to "see" something about a person. We're all quite intuitive about these things. I just got good at verbalizing some of these general patterns. An example? Well, let's say a 19-year-old girl calls in and asks if she's pregnant. Just let your stream of consciousness take you on a journey regarding this girl and her life, and you'll see all the stuff you can "know" about her if you just let it come to you.
But it wasn't long before I had moments when my cognitive impressions about a caller were quite different from the cards I was dealing or the visuals I was getting. And I soon learned that I would screw up the reading if I ignored the cards or the visuals. I just "went with it," and if I saw a black car, I mentioned it. Or if the seven of cups came up in a particular place in the deal, I'd say, "You're gonna move soon," even if it didn't seem like the discussion up until then supported it. Pregnancies, weddings, deaths, illnesses, promotions, firings, fires - - all of these and more would come to me. Sometimes I struggled to find the words to express the thought (you just don't blurt out "Grandpa's dying") but I figured that if the message came through, it was my job to express it.
One time when I was about 20, I went to see a psychic, a sweet older lady in her 70's with white curly hair who sat at her French Provincial dining room table and did readings. She found out that my mother had died, and asked, "Is her spirit around you?" I said, "No," and a couple of seconds later I felt a shivering WHOOSH around me, and the old lady said, "Well she's here now," and I thought, "Yup, she is," and then the psychic proceeded to verbalize a whole stream of stuff, mostly that my mom was saying "I love you - I'm sorry - I love you - I'm sorry." It was a blow-away moment, that's for sure. I KNEW my mother was in the room with us.
Maybe the most astounding experiment Meyer describes involves subliminal messaging - the idea that millisecond-long messages like "I want popcorn" and "Buy me" flashed at people and absorbed by the unconscious could effect behavior. Advertizers discovered it in the 60's and their manipulations were amazingly effective in selling product. In the experiment, two groups of people who signed up for a 12-week smoking sessation class received excactly the same instruction, except one group watched a video that had been edited to contain the subliminal message, "Mommy and I are one," and the other group watched the same video without the subliminal message. After the twelve weeks, all the participants had given up smoking. Six months later, the group that hadn't received the message experienced about a 57% return to smoking. The other group experienced only a 15% return to smoking. The odds of such a difference in success rate is in the millions. And I was astounded.
"Mommy and I are one?" Can it be such a universal thing that the behavior of a random group of smokers can be so affected by absorbing this message of comfort? I mean, do people seek comfort from cigarettes and food and shopping and sex and drugs because they miss their mommies, feel separated from them? Can it be this easy?
My mommy has been dead since I was 17. I was closer to her than to anyone in my life before or since. She was the world to me. In the year after her death I went around in a haze and gained a hundred pounds. I wasn't quite sure I would make it.
In time, my cognitive mind accepted her death, accepted my aloneness, and I don't think of her much. When I do, there's some sadness and regret, some nostalgic feelings, some good memories, and that's about it. The rational head says, "You're a grown-up now, Steve, you do not have your Mommy anymore, and this is what life is for you." But I cannot doubt that, subconsciously, intuitively, psychically, emotionally, physically, I miss my mommy.
Food is a comfort to me. Definitely. That's my number one reason. I use food to comfort myself. Sometimes I do not cognitively know what I'm comforting myself about - it's not like I'm always in a state of fear about the world or worried about my job, or any of a thousand things that could cause me to need comfort. Yeah, living in the world these days isn't a snap and can be fraught with concerns, and sometimes legitimately need comforting, which is not available to me in any form more readily accessible than a pint of Hagen-Daaz. I think it just might be as fundamental as I need my mommy. This is my baseline. This is where I reside, whether I see and acknowledge it or not. Efforts to lose weight quickly become ineffective because the underlying truth is that I need to be comforted, and food is my go-to for comfort. Period.
When did I "lose" my mommy? Not when she died; it was a long time before that. It was when I was five years old and realized I was gay, and concurrently felt that if my mother ever found out, she would stop loving me. This is the basic story of my life. And by the way, I was a scrawny kid until I was five. One of my first memories is frantically stuffing rice with butter and soy sauce (we lived in Japan) into my mouth while I was sobbing. I don't remember why I was sobbing. I distinctly remember the sound of the sobs pushing through a mouth full of sticky rice - the sound dampened as if I had stuffed a wet rag in my mouth.
I never came out to my mother. When she died, I lost the opportunity to find out whether my five-year-old-hatched theory was true, that she would stop loving me if she knew. Once when I was 12 I broached the subject with her, asking what she thought of homosexuals, and she spewed forth such hatred that I just shut down forever the idea that I could tell her.
I mean, really. If I were a script, the arc would be so damned obvious - little boy figures out he's gay, fears losing his mother's love, starts to eat to comfort himself, the mom dies, and he grows up a fat man. What a cliche - what a bore. No studio would ever greenlight it. As much as I distain this mundane truth about myself, I cannot deny its authenticity.
So can I change this fundamental need in my mind to seek comfort with food by absorbing the message, "Mommy and I are one?" Well, we will see. I just installed subliminal messaging software on my PC and will be getting "Mommy and I are one" flashed at me at the rate of every five seconds whenever I sit before the computer.
My cognitive processes haven't been able to release me from this simple cause/effect life theme, and not for lack of trying, God knows. Maybe something as simple as subliminal messaging can rewrite my core belief and release the need to be comforted because I miss my mommy.
Mommy, can you hear me? Mommy, can you feel me? Mommy, can you see me in the dark?
