FORTUNE TELLING. A Personal Testimony

Philosophy Forums Psychology and Mind
1

Back in 1975, while still an avid atheist, I had my first of many subsequent experiences with a fortune teller.

She happened to be our next door neighbor. Her husband had recently died and, according to her testimony, shortly after his passing her claire-sentient abilities became active. She quickly became widely known via (like in the TV series Medium) helping the police to solve several missing person mysteries. All number of expensive late-model out-of-state motor cars kept appearing at her curbside thereafter.

I had just re-married and my new wife was fascinated by what she had heard about the woman and wanted her own fortune told. My wife had lived a strange life as an infant foundling, left on the doorstep of a Catholic convent in Johannesburg. The nuns had raised her. While growing up in the convent she was witness to a number of metaphysical events. She once told me the story of how all the girls in her dormitory were awoken one night to see one of the girls sleep-walking. She walked straight up the side of the wall, across the ceiling and down the other side - creeping everybody out in the process.

Anyway, I came home from work one day to find our psychic neighbor invited over for tea. In due course she brought out a little black velvet bag, and drew forth a crystal ball. After some moments of concentration, she announced that she could see nothing of my wife’s future, but that she could see mine perfectly well. Out of politeness, I pretended to be interested and agreed for her to make a reading.

Her first announcement was that I would be leaving South Africa within a a year or two - for good.
That was a complete surprise to me. I had just married a new wife; bought a new house; and been appointed to a new job as a senior television producer for the South African Broadcasting Corporation. Leaving the country of my birth and hudred of relatives, for good while dumping a plum job was not in any way part of my life plan.
“And where,” I asked jokingly, “will I make my new life?”
She stared into the ball. "I see palm trees and also snow-capped mountains.

Well, the long and the short of it is that within that year I produced a documentary that focused on the life of Mahatma Gandhi in South Africa and his struggled with racial discrimination that ultimately made him famous throughout the British Empire. This anti-apartheid TV program, which featured an interview with the recently un-banned Dr. Alan Paton of "Cry the Beloved Country" fame, and one-time jailer of Gandhi, got me into serious hot water with the Bureau of State Security (BOSS). The program was banned and my future as a producer with the SABC was ruined. Threatened with house arrest if I made another program, I was more or less forced to leave the county in exile.
So, unlikely as it was, that part of the fortune teller’s prophecy came perfectly true.

After traveling around the world for several years seeking a permanent home. I eventually settled in the United States of America.

Between 1981 and 1992, my permanent address in Hollywood, was an apartment block on Carlton Way, as small side street running between Sunset and Hollywood Boulevards. Back in 1906, the residents on that street had planted a quarter mile long row of palm trees, evenly spaced, on both sides. In 1981 they had grown to be over 90 feet tall - easily the most dominant feature in that neighborhood. So, for more then a decade, all I saw every day of my life was palm trees, fulfilling the second part of the prediction.

In 1992, I moved my growing family to a high desert ranch in Nevada. We have been here for the past 14 years. The ranch is situated on a dry lake bed surrounded by the White Mountain and Silver Peak ranges, among the highest snow-clad peaks in the nation. (14,000 high just five miles to our west, and a second range. 10, 000 feet high dominates the the immediate western view.

And so it is, twenty years after the fact, all three of the visions that woman saw in her crystal ball, has materialized.

As a normal sane person, desperate to sustain a firm grip on the mundane, the question I would keep asking myself (that is if a large number of other incrediblyaccurate predictions that have also materialized had not long ago made a sane/insane believer out of me) is; just how far and how long can one call a perfectly predicted series of totally unlikely events, simply a “co-incidence” ??

2

12.15.06.1783

This is a very interesting post, and at the same time, an equally interesting testimony. However, my skepticism compels me to completely distrust the validity of your story… especially the story (although really cool) of the girl walking up one wall, across the ceiling, and down the other side.

Of course, I could go on to suggest that the fortune teller was a hot reader (having foreknowledge of your dealings) and coupled this with some cold reading to produce a vague suggestive future. For example, limiting the location of where you would end up moving to by just specifying palms and mountains could account for multiple locations around the world… I would have just as easily guessed you to end up on an island in the Caribbean before I read that you ended up in Hollywood.

3

I had wondered if this post, which seems to have clearly predestined a number of major movements in my life, might provoke a general discussion on free will.
In the interests of provoking this discussion, I have several other personal predictions that have, despite all the odds, turned out to be perfectly true. Here follows one of them.

I have always admired the verility of both my grandfathers.
My paternal grandfather, a Scot, had twelve children.
My maternal grandfather, a Jew, had thirteen.

I remarked repeatedly while growing up, both humerously and out of a youthful sense of bravado, that I would out-do both of my grandfathers by having five wives and fourteen children.

I am 65 years old now and the sober fact is that, via a variety of circumstances, mostly beyond my control. I have been married to five women and have had fourteen children.
Nine are living.
Five died.

4

12.19.06.1804

So, rather than turning a discussion out of the comment I made concerning the fortune teller, you wish to change the subject entirely and talk about free will, which was your true intent from the get-go? What was free will to play a part of that fortune teller story anyway? Was a discussion supposed to arise out of the possibility that you heard the predictions of the teller and in response, deliberately performed actions that would result in the fulfillment of those revealations?

I would be interested to know what those circumstances, which were out of your control, were that led you to remarry four times and have that many children.

5

I believe that Free Will has every and nothing to do with predictions - as well as with this conversation.

A/ They will happen because a force beyond one’s self has made it so.
B/ They happen because, as you suggrest, one consciously or sub-consciously fulfills them.

Who is to say which? You? Me? Science? God?

You thought that the Caribbean might be my destiny.
I thought of Kashmir.
The palm tree apartment in Hollywood was picked out and assigned to me while I was in London, by a producer friend who asked me to come and join him. It was only years after living there that I recalled the prediction and made the connection. Same with the mountains.
The snow capped scene in Nevada was the result of a donation made to our non-profit foundation by a wealthy philanthropist who was interested in our researches in global management.
However one looks at it, some kind of paranormal force seems to have been at work - inside me or outside me. For me it does not matter which, for I believe that God and Man are aspects of the same consciousness that will one day, when our human evolution completes its cycle, reunite.

Your further question about my marriages and children and how the numbers finally worked out as I laughingly predicted when I was 18 years old, are infintely more complicated. It would take me pages to explain the intricate weave of circumstances that took place in Africa, the Middle and Far East, Europe and America.

One thing I will say about my third wife, a Canadian. I predicted that who-ever she was, her birthday would be precisely six months, to the day opposite to mine. I was born June 25th. She was born December 24th. I only found that out after I had fallen in love with her.

As for my children, I accurately intuited each of their sexes long before the predictions were confirmed by ultrasound.

All I know for certain is that nobody knows if we have free will or not. If anybody did, the question about God would have been settled long ago.

6

Yes, either coincidence or you subconsciously influenced it.

And exodus from South Africa is not unique. I once went to a house party where everybody (except me) were exiles from Rhodesia. Eight couples.

And I live in California, the entire west coast and 500 miles inland have palm trees and views of snow capped mountains. Seeing as how many South Africans have migrated here, I’d say the prediction if pretty vague and tame.

7

You sound so authoritative about this. How naive and safe and sane that is for one to live in that single dimentional state.

At the time the predictiion was made it was pretty unique. The massacre at Soweto happened a year later. Prior to June 1976 exodus from S.A. was very rare. Rhodesians were in hot water many years before South Africans were, thousands poured across the Limpopo into our country.

A quarter million expatriate South Africans are now scattered all over the planet - more in Australia than America. That crystal gazer could have seen icebergs, savannahs, jungles, and hundreds of other topographical features on the planet, where I might just as easily have ended up. Put this fact into combination with two separate unrelated features and it takes the odds of being right into the thousands.

To further add to the odds. In my case the foretelling happened to be more specific than just a general view of the Californian landscape. The palms were right outside my doorstep and the snow-capped mountains in Nevada loom above me as I speak.

8

One is sort of forced into these positions since there is absolutely no evidence that psychic powers exist. None.

On the other hand, we have a oodles of evidence proving hoaxes and easily fooled believers. :wink:

Coincidence occurs a million times a day.

9

OUR FATE IS WRITTEN IN THE CARDS

Now that membrane theory has unseated string theory, and in the process resurrected the eerie concept of parallel universes and injected the concept of yet another dimension into reality, let me take you on a journey far deeper in twilight zone than my previous story about the crystal gazer and her predictions about palm trees and snow-capped mountains.

This report, if you choose to remain open to it, will undermine your four dimensional concept of reality. It traverses the fourth dimension of Time and takes us to the edge of that vacuum in the eleventh dimension where parallel universes collide. In my mind it clearly illustrates that Time is indeed totally relevant – that the future has already happened and co-exists with the past and the present.

As this is a long story that encompasses five separate events with a six event yet to unfold its secret meaning, I will break it up into several segments and gauge your response to each - if indeed there are any.

Here goes nothing – or something…

One day, just before leaving South Africa, I was rummaging through some drawers when I came upon a pack of unused post cards that I had bought some-time previously. There were six cards in the pack, all faced with a different sepia-tone drawings created by oriental artists. As I put my hand on the pack I was overcome by a strange sensation. I felt that I had fallen into some kind of spiraling time warp. The pack of cards felt infinitely heavy in my hands. I had a distinct premonition. For some unfathomable reason, I had a powerful inner sense that I was holding my own destiny in my hands. As the disconcerting spiral subsided, I turned to the cards and spent a long time studying each one of them, trying to decipher what each of the drawings was foretelling.

The first card showed a picture of the Buddha. He was surrounded by a shining halo and sitting re-splendid on a lotus throne.
The next was a black goat.
The third was a portrait of two geishas sitting side by side.
The fourth was a drawing of a man dressed in silk robes lying under a tree out in the country; the caption beneath it (the only card with one) read “Nobleman retires to the county for a period of rest and contemplation.”
The fifth showed a single, younger, geisha girl.
The sixth and final card showed a religious procession of some sort, with a group of people carrying banners and circling a pagoda.

None of the cards made any clear sense to me at the time and over the following months and years as my life went on, the weird feeling that they told my life story gradually faded from my consciousness.

Here, briefly, follows the sequence of seemingly unrelated events that led me back to that deck of cards.

After a traumatic period of personal confrontation with the administrators South African Broadcasting Corporation, over their banning of an anti-apartheid production if mine, together with threats of house arrest from the Bureau of State Security hanging over my head, I felt forced to leave South Africa and seek my fortune abroad. After some time spent in the Middle East and Europe, I ended up, more or less moribund, in the Ojai Valley in California, not knowing which way to turn. Added the confusion of the direction my life was taking me, my second wife decided that she wanted me out of her life. I left America alone and went off to the Far East where I eventually landed a job as a television producer for Radio Television Hong Kong. For the next two years I produced, virtually single-handedly, a weekly magazine program entitle “Here in Hong Kong”. Though my program was rated at the most watched, eventually the sheer pressure of the Monday night, prime-time deadline took its toll and I ended up mentally, emotionally and physically exhausted. With some vague idea of seeking a retreat, I walked out of the producer’s job in Hong Kong and caught a plane to Japan.

Upon arrival in Tokyo, for the first time in my life, I had a frightful moment of complete disorientation. I suddenly had no real idea of what I was doing, where I was going, or why I was ten thousand miles away from my place of birth. With every sign written only in Chinese characters and nobody speaking English, I did not know where to go next or whom to consult. I sat down on my suitcase for a good twenty minutes, desperately fighting off the panic attack. I managed to pull myself together and caught the bullet train to Kyoto.

By some stroke of fortune I met a Japanese girl who not only spoke English, but when I mentioned an interest in spending some time in retreat in a Zen monastery, she personally knew of one of the few monasteries in Japan which accepted the occasional geijin.

So it was that I spent a year in Hosshinji monastery, prostrating myself daily inside the meditation zendo, before a statue of a shining Buddha sitting on his lotus throne. At the end of that year, before my visa expired, I accepted ordination by the roshi, and was formally registered as a Buddhist minister at the Soto Zen headquarters in Eiheji,

And so it was, some five years after seeing it, that the first card in my private tarot pack fulfilled its prediction.

10

01.07.07.1840

Zen Buddhist minister, eh? After being ordained, then what?

11

If one is Japanese you are placed in a traditional temple and authorised to administer spiritual rites to the local congregation. This is largely impossible for westerners because of the need to be fully conversant in reading and writng Chinese characters. In addition, the names and messages on most ancestral gravestones in the temple grounds are in archaic characters. As filial piety is an integral part of oriental cultural values, the priest needs to know the history of the family he is officiating with. Western scholars in general can only memorize some two thousand characters at best. So we are left to spread Zen techniques for self realization in the West as best we can.
In order for zen to be zen, there is no fixed doctrine as there is in other forms of Buddhism, so we are free to adapt our practice and teaching to different corcumstances. The essence of zen lies not in ritual or sermon, but in the active practice of zazen - seated meditation. If one can learn to discipline and silence the mundane mind (subjective left brain analytical rationalizations that are contaminated by material desires) for long enough, objective universal realizations will arise of their own accord.

THE GOAT CARD

I am firmly convinced - after having enough trouble in my life trying to see and treat women in a compatible manner - that if male babies are not given enough time on the breast to be properly weaned, they are never able to get over it.

I do not have any scientific data on the subject, but I think that all men - who cannot relate to a woman’s mind and character in an equable manner - are locked into an infantile insatiable need to suckle. For me this gender ignorance lead to an immature first marriage when I was barely twenty one years old. That inability to see her essential qualities as a human being, never allowed me to properly evaluate and appreciate the sterling character of the girl who mothered our child and who remained loyal to me as I struggled to work my way off the mass production line and become my own master. That same blankness led me to divorce her after I made it through the door to become rich and famous and marry a younger beautiful model, who ended up dumping me several years later when my fortune changed for the worse. This is not to mention any number of extra-marital affairs that served to screw up my dysfunctional attitude to women even further.

I share the misery of all this personal mess with a host of fellow male suffers, in the hope that by my own sorry example, I can reveal how I finally managed to find a methodology that would allow me to attain a change of heart and a reasonable degree of clarity in male/female relationships and the even more serious business of mate selection. What I have found and applied to my marriage for the past twenty five years, has gradually taught me how to treat women far more equably and holistically, and not just as surrogate mothers and sex objects.

My graduation beyond the infantile need for the breast, and the ability to see all women as the essential other dynamic of the collective human psyche, also allowed me to finally decipher and understand the appearance and importance of the enigmatic Card of the Goat in my private tarot.

There is long and convoluted story of what happened to me after leaving the monastery in Japan and realizing the Card of the Buddha. It includes nine long and lonely months living as a hermit in cave on a tiny island in the middle of the Gulf of Siam. The difficult time that I had trying to evaluate who and what I was before my period of gestation was over and could safely emerge from the womb of that cave, reborn in spirit, led me to the conclusion that the only sane life on this planet lay, not in the personal material ambitions of fame and gain, but in responding earnestly to the natural biological impulse to find a compatible mate and raise a family.

It is one thing to realize a basic truth and quite another to put it into practice. Suffice to say that after leaving the cave, I made three more mistakes in choosing a mate, (one of them serious enough to require the rest of my life to repair it) before I lit on a methodology that would allow me to be more objective in my choice.

Believe it or not, the answer, which I believe can be applied to any other dysfunctional being who cannot recognize one’s true love with inner sight and hook up with the perfect mate, lies in the ancient art of correctly divining the purport of one’s zodiacal birth sign as it is positioned in the astrological chart.

Loa Tsu taught that the essential universal principle is symbolized in the dynamic of yin/yang. I took this polarized male/female principle of Taoism and applied it to the western zodiac.

As a Cancerian, born on June 25th, I divined that my perfect opposite should have her birthday exactly 182 or 183 days apart from mine. December 24th or 25th… I did not consciously connect at that time, the fact that the goat, which is the astrological symbol of Capricorns, could also refer to the goat that had appeared in my cards nearly a decade earlier.

My wife’s name is Donna. She was born in Canada on December 24th. When friends introduced me to her for a second time and told me her birthday, without the astrological connection there is no way that I would ever have recognized her as my perfect mate. I have been invariably attracted to flamboyant women who stand out in a crowd. (ike my mother was) Donna is understated. I had actually met and shook hands with her a few months earlier and she had been invisible to me then.

I doubt that there are any two other people on this planet that have turned out to be more compatible. She compliments me in every way possible. By sitting exactly opposite me on the astrological chart she can see me head on – every asset and every fault is clearly visible and the same vice-versa. Through her eyes I get a clear and trusting view of myself, warts and all. We cover each others failings and encourage each others strengths perfectly. We have had three children together. I do not believe that there is a dysfunctional bone in any of them.

She is my goat. She brought me clarity. She taught me to know and respect as well as revere the Divine value of the feminine principle. I love her dearly and always will.

12

Have still yet to read the last 2 or 3 postings on this topic: as they didn’t print out, but what I did read: I wasn’t sceptical about (apart from the convent girl walking up the wall and ceiling story, but who am I to say that this didn’t happen).

I/other’s, can sense things to come (don’t ask me how: I don’t know) I can only sense things regarding myself though (selfish I know).

Looking into Shamanism and Buddhism helped me cope with who I was and what was happening, and has taken me to this point in time :0/

We all accept that animals (sharks etc) have a 6th sense: so why do people not think that humans might too?

13

I have not posted more because the next cards that predicted my future get more personal and controversial. I am trying to compose those posts in a way that does not affend anybody.

14

01.26.07.1879

It is certainly an interesting story. However, one thing I would like clarification on is that in two instances you referred to the appearance of Chinese characters in Japan. I find this a little disturbing to read as when I lived in Japan, I didn’t see Chinese characters. I saw a great deal of the three classes of Japanese characters known as Kanji, Kana (specifically Katakana and Hiragana), and Romaji. So, I would appreciate some clarification.

15

Kanji=Chinese characters.

If you can read one, you can read the other.

Japanese is just Chinese with wierd, dan-like squiggles surrounding the words.

At least in proper sentences. Sometimes they are mostly squiggles, and then it gets hard.

16

01.26.07.1880

Well… I suppose that can be considered “clarification”. Thanks Xun. The time I was there, I never got around to reading the characters, just knowing how to distinguish one class from the other.

Anyway… it’s an interesting story… If it were made into a book and marketed as non-fiction, it would probably get alot of attention, start a huge debate about validity, and eventually be labeled as fiction… like that James Frey book: A Million Little Pieces.

17

THE CARD OF THE TWO GEISHAS

Relating the significance of the card of the two geishas and how that card foretold yet another main event in my life, may well turn out to be an affront to the cultural sensibilities of many. It is for this reason that I have hesitated for so many years to tell the whole truth of it to anyone outside my immediate family. I am telling it now for two reasons. People, who have been indoctrinated into a purely scientific view of life, believe that any reality beyond physical explanation does not exist. To mystics who have traveled the astral that view is biased. To paraphrase Carl Sagan, the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

The story so far, in my view, is already in the twilight zone, and as we go further into it, the metaphysical nature of it becomes more evident – and despite personal reservations, it is important, in support of the metaphysical point of view, that I continue.
.
Here, then, for what it is worth, follows the revelation of the card of the two geishas

I met Vera in California a year before Donna came into my life. I was fresh out of the monastery and the cave and my psyche was still pretty clean… I sensed from the first moment of our meeting that Vera was a troubled soul seeking answers to life’s mysteries and that my mission with her had to be primarily spiritual. If I had stayed true to that first impression, and not succumbed to her feminine charms, things might have turned out a whole lot differently for the two of us. It would have helped if I had been more clued up about female psychology at the time. I would have realized that Vera’s spiritual needs were sublimate to her over-riding emotional problems.

What I know now and did not know then was; just as males struggle with emotional immaturity because of improper mothering, so too do females who have not been satisfactorily fathered. I was to find out that she was the youngest child of a domineering mother who observed her off-spring more as embellishments to her own ego, rather than as young souls seeking guidance via their birth through her. Her father was over seventy years old when Vera was born.

She was at the very bottom of the pecking order of six older siblings, all scrambling for whatever scant parental recognition that was available, and consequently, despite a sharp mind and artistic gifts, she suffered from neglect and low self esteem. The net result was a troubled mix of intellectual rebellion, artistic frustration and an insatiable need for affection, especially male, which she had sought unsatisfactorily in the arms of many different men before I met her.

Still not fully weaned from mother needs myself, and with Vera freely offering her ample charms, the net result was that it was not long before the student and the teacher sought nurturing from each other in the same bed. Easy to see the wrong move in retrospect, but there is never any good reasoning when the emotions are embroiled. The reality was that two emotional infants clinging to each other rarely make for a sober adult relationship.

If I had known how melodious Vera’s singing voice was and how keen her musical ear, I would have taken an entirely different direction in spiritually ministering her than the intellectual approach I took at that time. What is known in tantric yoga is that there is a chakra (spiritual center) located in the throat that only opens to an adept that has in this life or one in the past, advanced kundulini energy beyond the heart chakra. The result is either great oratory skills or a beautiful singing voice. (This spiritual adoration, in my opinion, is the reason why we idolize our best singers to the extreme extent that we do) .

Vera’s chi was already high and if it were not for her emotional disturbance, I believe that she had more than enough talent to be a well-known singer. She never sang during the initial time we were together, so urging her to try bhakti yoga (rhythmically chanting the names of God to music as a daily exercise to joyously enlighten the spirit, (which is also the reason why westerners sing psalms in church) never entered my mind.

I will digress from the story here, as I believe it is of general interest for more people to know about this important yoga discipline.

I had learned about bhakti yoga years earlier as a television producer when I met and interviewed the spiritual leader of the Hare Krishna movement, A.C. Bhakti Vedenta, during his visit to South Africa in 1973. As part of my research for the Hare Krishna program, I attended one of the early morning chanting sessions at the Johannesburg Hare Krishna center. Thus it was that at 4 a.m one morning I found myself in the center of some two dozen saffron-robed, baldly-shaven young South Africans, all chanting an intricate mantra over and over again.
Hare Krishna.
Hare Krishna,
Hare hare,
Hare Rama
Hare Rama
Hare hare
The chanting of that mantra went on for the next two hours without interruption. I joined in hesitantly at first. Throughout the session I found that one could not remove the mind from the mantra and maintain its intricate phrasing. You had to keep concentrating on what you were chanting. Mental weariness set in every twenty minutes or so. What kept you going was the group. One or more would invariably over-come the weariness and liven up the chant, this would get us all going again. Around about ninety minutes into the session, a metaphysical event occurred. All sense of weariness vanished. All the voices became more vital, more joyous and more musical. A warm sense of loving communion filled the room. It engulfed me as well. I felt joined to the group. I was filled with energy and chanted with all my heart put into it… It was, without question the best group therapy I had ever experienced. I began then, to understand the power of communal love and what mankind could accomplish if we all felt together…

A.C. Vadenta, the Indian who had started the Hare Krishna movement was an interesting old codger in his own right. He had been a railway official, working for the British Raj much of his life. In his spare tome he had become one of India’s premier Sanskrit scholars. When he retired from the railways at 65, he set himself a monumental task. He would translate the entire wealth of Hindu scriptures, all the Vedas and Upanishads, into English, have each one fully illustrated and published, and distributed around the world.
Well, we all know that he accomplished that miracle - and all hats off to him. Not only did he bring the timeless wisdoms of India, he brought love to hundreds of thousands of lonely young western souls, who found group identity and self-realization through bhakti.

To return to my analysis of Vera and how she figured into geisha card.

Her family had immigrated from the Middle East in the early 1960’s when she was nine years old. They only spoke French and Arabic when they arrived. Adjusting to an American life style at a time when Middle Easterners were comparatively rare had not been easy for them. Vera had a sharp mind and took pride in the fact that within a year of arrival she had mastered English, was the main interpreter for the family and was already an A student at school. That pre-pubertal assumption of family leadership together with the distinctive Middle Eastern cast of her facial features, which alienated her to some extent from her Caucasian peer group, were the basic cues that gave me insight into what disturbed her psyche. I decided, wrongly as it turned out, that that the yoga discipline of jnani would be the best method to use to give her deeper insight into herself.

Again a slight digression, since jnai yoga also needs a brief explanation

Jnani yoga is an ancient Indian intellectual spiritual discipline that attempts to meld the analytical part of the psyche with its intuitive/inspirational potential. The discipline is recognized as the most difficult and complex of all the yoga techniques, and takes the longest to seat. In this sense it could be said that Aristotle set the entire scientific psyche down the jnani path towards self enlightenment twenty five centuries ago. Thus the western child is forced into the confines of classrooms for up to six hours a day for twelve years an more, and systematically indoctrinated with analytical rationality that is primarily based on the laws of physics. Jnani has to break through that fixed physical barrier, grounded as it is in gravity and limited by the speed of light, and try to awaken the psyche to metaphysical anomalies that seem to defy the basic laws of physics. Whereas the goal of the physicist is to look out at the macrocosm, the objective of the metaphysician is to penetrate inwards and discover the macrocosm operating within the microcosm of the self. (I believe that quantum theory is an evolutionary form of jnani and is currently working its magic on melding the two halves of the collective consciousness.)

The fundamental problem in the ancient form of the yoga practice is that once a crack is made in the hard analytical shell, the illusory nature of matter becomes more than just a theory, but an actual state of being. As result the neophyte begins to loose touch with a familiar gravity-bound base of reality. He or she is then faced with a void of unknowing. Since sanity is based on a consensus of mass opinion, letting go of that base of reality places the neophyte on the verge of insanity. St. John called this initial state of spiritual awakening; “The dark night of the soul” A leap of faith is required for one to step out into a void and believe that there is safe ground beyond. For this reason, great trust needs to be placed in one’s spiritual guide.

Vera had no reason to place such trust in me. Sleeping with her did not help. Familiarity always breeds its degree of contempt. So I tried get her to see jnani from a more objective perspective.

I had previously lived for a year in the spiritual center of Ojai Valley where the Theosophical Society, under the leadership of Annie Besant, had established their American headquarters. It was there that she and her cohort, Charles Webster Leadbeater, had trained the young Krishnamurti, believing that they were preparing the world for the next messiah. Krishnamurti is a pure jnani, who, when he turned 21 years old, had rejected their designs on his future and had become his own man. He occasionally lectured on spiritual development, in Ojai under the oaks. As an introduction to jnani yoga, I took Vera there to hear him.

The exercise backfired. Jnani can only work its magic on a troubled soul when strict intellectual honesty governs the discourse, especially when one is backed into a corner. Calmness of mind is essential. The import of Krishnamurti’s discourse went up the wrong psychic channel and exited Vera’s intellect into counter argument. In the months that followed, whenever I applied a jnani technique in an attempt make her realize that she was a spiritual neophyte who had yet to grasp the apparent contradictions, ambiguities and subtle inferences that abound in theosophical argument, and that jnani yogis took at least twenty five years to master the art of self-realization, instead of trusting me as a spiritual adviser with her interest at heart, I became the ineffectual father figure who had failed her. Her emotions intruded and her responses became irrational.

As said, if I had my own emotional hang-ups with females under better control at that time, I could probably have handled her reaction with far more circumspection than I did. Sexual intimacy had been a serious mistake on both our parts. To cut a painful story short, after some six months of endless argument, I realized that I had jumped back into the same old emotional frying pan that I had tried to cool off in the monastery. Out of pure self-preservation I selfishly ended the intimate side of our relationship and conducted it on a more intermittent level.

This parting of the ways had a devastating effect on Vera. Within the next year she met, married and divorced an Indian man she hardly knew and ended up more distraught then ever.

In the meantime I had met and committed my life to Donna. During that first year, while Vera suffered, Donna and I had a child which she birthed at home. I had never felt so content with a woman in my life. Donna was my goat. My happiness would have been complete if it was not for the shame and guilt I felt about virtually abandoning Vera to her own resources.

During and after her divorce Vera came often to visit me for counseling. She was unable to reconcile the fact that I was happy and she was not. She was bitter. Our relationship got ever more emotional. It began to affect my happiness with Donna.

One night Vera manifested herself clearly before me in the magnificence of her astral form. Her dark beauty literally lit up the entire room. Her apparition confronted me head on. “You will fail!” she said. Then she disappeared. (I am not going to digress here into a lengthy explanation of the duplicate astral body – except to say that M-Theory, which is inclusive of the concept of parallel multiverses, is stepping into the same waters as the ancient yogi masters.)

I had been practicing metaphysics long enough to take Vera’s astral curse very seriously. Though I did not think I could fail in my life, her psychic interference had to be dealt with at a far deeper level than I was doing at that time. The fact that she had the spiritual energy to accomplish an astral projection, confirmed for me that I was dealing with an advanced soul, The solution that came to my mind, came right out of the blue. Polygamy! Vera had to be included in our family.

Though dubious at the start, Vera, in desperate straits, clutched at it. To say the least, Donna was aghast. Our content seemed smashed. She took our son and went to live with here family. It took a year for her to come around and see that I was caught between two very powerful astral forces. Besides which, our son needed a father. She saw no other alternative than to share our life and love with Vera.

Donna, Vera and I have been quietly living a polygamist life for the past twenty five years. Donna has three children. Vera has four. I will not say it has been easy. Not for us our relatives. People think polygamy is all about sex and relegate it to a primitive mind-set. In reality it is all about taking on the burden of two families and staying totally true to both.

I do not advocate polygamy as an equal alternative to a loving monogamous marriage in which neither spouse ever deceives the other in thought, word or deed. But I will say this; with broken marriage vows now over 60%, I find it far more honest and less damaging to children than the state-sponsored version of polygamy – which condones any amount of wives and husbands by legalizing divorce without much care for the destruction of family values. For me, who has been through a conventional marriage and divorce twice, with a son past forty years old who continues to suffer from infantile father neglect, breaking up the family is the worst of two evils. An alimony check can never replace a missing parent or repair the trauma of a broken promise in a child’s heart. My present children, despite occasional instances of social ostracism, and the inevitable TV program that demonizes polygamists, are emotionally secure and intellectually gifted. We have their love and respect as parents.

Though somewhat isolated by what I consider intrinsically to be a hypocritical sense of social morality as regards polygamy and divorce, our family values are intact and we remain fully at peace with ourselves, no matter what the world thinks.

Vera’s astral curse, I believe, as our children reveal more and more of their creative potential, is gradually being lifted: If my children continue to succeed in life, then so have I.

And so it was that the card of the two geishas accurately predicted yet another extremely unlikely outcome in my future.

18

THE CARD SHOWING RETIREMENT TO THE COUNTRY

I lived from 1981 to 1991 with two growing families in two adjoining apartments in Hollywood.

The fate of a film producer in Tinsel town is reliant on two essential factors: Connections in the industry and schmoozing. As an expatriate South African I had few connections. The Director friend, who had first invited me to join him from London to help produce films on the United States Space program, had fallen into the dirty money pit of producing pornography and I left him. Schmoozing for new business has never been my forte. Innumerable production proposals were sent out through the post and all of them came right back to my doorstep with rejection slips attached.

Necessity is the mother of invention, especially with four hungry young kids underfoot.

In order to make a living for our family I came up with an inexpensive brand new method of using geometrically-cut vinyl pieces to design and manufacture a jewelry line for the female fashion industry. With less than a hundred bucks for raw materials as our start-up capital, the kitchen oven in one of the apartments, where the vinyl was baked and bent and assembled into endless intricate designs, became the center of our home-based jewelry manufacturing center. Hundreds of hand-made vinyl earrings, bracelets and belts started leaving the apartment via UPS delivery service. As with all new product lines we had to over-come strong initial buyer resistance at fashion shows. But we persisted, the designs gained a growing customer base on and we succeeded in doubling the business every year. As the business grew we marketed the line further and further a field. Every three months Vera and Donna alternated on sales trips to New York, Paris and Hong Kong. I was kept busy at home re-designing our line every three months to keep pace with trends of the industry, as well as minding the kids.

In my spare time I started the first chapters of a book that would eventually become the major creative focus of my life. Psyche-Genetics outlines the entire evolution of human consciousness – from the infant naiveté of Stone Age family groups, to our eventual graduation into a state of collective sage hood, in a Cosmic Age yet to come. It is based on the years of research I spent as a documentary film maker among a wide variety of developing social groups in various parts of the world.

As our evolution of consciousness runs in tandem with advances in technological development, I started a think tank, conducted basically over the phone, (the internet had yet to become a reality) which exchanged ideas on future advances in energy production, large-scale greenhouse agriculture and vertical city construction. The think tank got off to a good start when the L.A. Times published an engineering drawing if mine, which illustrated how an ocean-energy power station could extract electricity from wave action. It got a further injection when the Dupont Corporation got interested in my large-scale greenhouse ideas. Their proposal was that of I could establish an experimental site and build the frame-work, they would donate $60,000.00 worth of a new type on non-biodegradable Teflon plastic sheeting that could be adapted for use as a desert greenhouse cover.

Our family may well have been in the lucrative fashion jewelry business to this day if a series of events had not materialized to change everything. Vera had repeatedly urged me to patent our unique method of jewelry production. I had refused on the grounds that any person claiming exclusive proprietary ownership of any creative expression was immoral. All expressions of human genius is a genetic inheritance that comes down to us as the investment of tens of thousands of ancestral endeavors - and was therefore the property of all of their descendents. I relied on the moral basis of my conviction to protect us. But my fate, already pre-determined by a series of printed post-cards, played out its implacable hand.

Just as our hand-made jewelry business was about to break the million-dollar-a-year sales barrier, the market was flooded with exact copies of our designs, mass-produced in Taiwan at one tenth of the price. Our business, which we had taken years to build up, collapsed over-night.

At this stage I began to have a series of dire premonitions. Iraq had just invaded Kuwait and the older President Bush was busy urging members of the United Nations to help intervene. Everybody was gung-ho with no thought of our country being vulnerable to any form of serious retaliation.

My first premonition was of a bio-terrorist attack via mass mailing through the U.S. postal service. The feeling was strong enough for me to phone the news department at the local CBS station and tell them to broadcast a warning that such an eventuality was feasible. They sent a reporter to interview me, thinking, that I might have secret information. When they found out it was just a premonition they disregarded the story as an unnecessary need for mass alarm.

The biblical fable of Sodom and Gomorrah began to haunt me. Life on top of the San Andreas fault line with its innumerable earthquakes are part and parcel of L.A. life. But one night I had a lucid dream of the Big One going off. I am not a seismic expert, but in my dream the quake went on for long enough for the whole of the Los Angeles Basin’s water table to liquefy and turn solid ground into quicksand. L.A. ended up drowning instead of just crumbling. Three days later a strong quake hit San Francisco, collapsing freeways and killing dozens.

Now the premonition moved from Sodom to focus exclusively on Gomorrah. What was their affront to God? Why would their walls need to collapse? The answer came. Baal! The worship of the golden calf. The Almighty Dollar was the supreme God of America. Money determined everything. Social status. Credibility. Authority. It did not matter how one got it as long as one had a lot of it. Every child was trained to bow before it. To be poor was to be despised. Gambling with stocks and bonds on the temple floor of the global estate was the name of the game. The more I thought about it the more convinced I became that the walls of Gomorrah would indeed come tumbling down about our ears – but which commercial trading center? Here in L.A. or in New York?

I desperately wanted to get the family away from the city. But we were trapped. Since I had refused on principle to pay our workers minum wages, our profits were slim and most of that was tied up in now useless raw materials. We had very little financial reserves. Just then a business partner, knowing of my wishes, mentioned that someone was offering free land out on the California border in Nevada. It sounded like an obvious land scam. But I had a strong premonition to investigate the offer.

To cut a long story short, the offer was genuine. My plans for stewarding the land in a sustainable manner satisfied the wealthy benefactor. The partnership with Dupont on the desert greenhouse cover helped clinch the deal. We eventually got the title deeds, free of charge, to forty desert acres situated in the middle of a remote valley amidst the mountains on the north edge of the Great Desert Basin.

Over the past fourteen years, in country retirement, far away from the hurly-burly of city life in this quiet valley, we have had a chance to raise our kids the way Nature intended. While building up the ranch I have had years to contemplate over the long history of human development and finish writing my book.

As for my premonitions: Two weeks after leaving L.A. The North Ridge earthquake collapsed hundreds of buildings in the L.A. area. One of them was the very apartment block we had just vacated. Five people were killed via anthrax sent through the mail. And I had the eerie experience of watching the great walls of Gomorrah collapse into dust in New York

So, in this manner, the fourth card that foretold my future destiny came to pass exactly as predicted.

19

The sixth card which shows a group of people engaged in a religious ceremony has not materialized.

My premonition is that it will portray a scene at my funeral,

One can read this story passively and move on
Or really delve into the questions it raises
Is life Free Will?
Do we trod the path of pre-destiny?
Or can we contemplate on a parallel state of existence?

20

I think that most ‘Fortunetellers’ excel at sizing up a potential client by using superior intuitive skills and are then able to make their ‘predictions’. I agree that “palm trees and mountains” is pretty vague, one or the other applies to very large percentages of the world. It was one of those things that couldn’t help but be correct. You’re talking about 20 years later. In 20 years so much can happen, its fairly likely you’d come across palm trees and then mountains at some point in that long a span of time, you know?

And if she had said perhaps, desert sands were in your future, could that not apply to some of the places you had subsequently lived? Howabout a view of the ocean? You could make arguments for just about any sort of terrain type that she had declared, which is what makes it a ‘safe’ declaration.

She can also ‘safely’ say that you would be leaving within a couple of years, because as another poster pointed out, exile from that area is not such a far fetched idea. Perhaps she knew something of you and your intentions and could draw this conclusion based on her intuitions and data on you rather than from some ‘mystical’ source.

My personal belief is that ‘fortuntellers’ can be an excellent source of predictions precisely because they can read people and trends so well. But whether or not they have ‘power’ to “see beyond” I haven’t really seen any evidence of, personally.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve done my share. And I’ve had my share of eerie experiences that I’ve later had to write off as coincidence as well.

…

When I was 17 I was living in Ixtlahuacan, Mexico - and a bunch of friends and myself got in a van and drove out to the Pacific coast somewhere in Nayarit that was undeveloped - miles of untouched beach. We camped there and cooked and fished and drank and had a grand old time. On our last night there I was walking down the beach and my friend Maricruz (who had always been hailed the ‘mystical’ one) came and walked with me and said to me “Ya no caminaras” (Roughly : You wont walk anymore / You will not walk). I kinda looked at her thinking I misunderstood, as my spanish wasn’t perfect at this point. Then she said “Ya no caminaras en este playa” -(You will not walk on this beach) (future tense). She smiled, I smiled, we went back to camp. The next day we drove home. One week later, we climbed up a mountain in Jalisco called La Mesa and she told me “You will not climb.” and later we danced around a fire and she told me, all very cryptically, “You will not dance.” I remember thinking how strange she was acting, like she’d be detached when she told me these things.

Well, long story short - this was all in September. At the beginning of October - due to no additional trauma or accident - I was walking up a flight of stairs carrying a tray of food and suddenly lost all feeling in my lower body, dropped the tray, yelled for help, and spent the next 2 years of my life in a wheelchair with partial paralysis, told by doctors that I would never walk again. So you see, Mari’s prediction came true. I have never walked on that beach, or climbed that mountain, or danced beside a fire, in fact I had to return to the US for most of my medical treatment and physical therapy. So at first, I think how miraculous it is that Mari could know these things were going to happen to me.

Then the skeptic kicks in. She coulda just been saying stuff. She didn’t even tell me she was MAKING a prediction - all three of the times what she was saying could have been easily explained away as context of the situation. You have a lot of time to think about these things when you’re trapped and unable to move, yes? And then if she was trying to do a prediction, how unreasonable is it that I would never walk again on a beach that far from my ‘temporary’ home of Ixtla and my ‘permanent’ home of the US? How likely that I would ever climb that mountain again, and dance around that fire? Not too likely. The predicitons were ‘safe’. Though she also told me, she would miss me - and at the time I had no intention of returning to the states, that I did so was just a consequence.

So to this day I wonder.

Do I believe that people can know things they shouldn’t have any way of knowing and that they are in some way in contact with something beyond our “realm”? Lets just say I’m not ready to dismiss the idea entirely.

However, most fortunetellers who say “I’m a fortunteller and I will now see your future” I find are just good readers of people and know how to tell you what you want to hear. And if it comes true, you remember. But if it doesn’t come true, then you just write it off, you forget about it, its unimportant.

When I was in high school, my friend Cristina swore by her “psychic” who guided her life and had proved herself right so many times. She also told Cristina that her mother would die of a rare blood disease when Cristina was 23. This was unlike the usual ‘vague’ predictions that you get, it said a time and a method and something permanent like death. However, Cristina being 17 at the time, it was a while in the future.

Years later for whatever reason I was caused to think about this so I looked Cris up and asked her about it. She, a firm believer in her psychic’s authenticity and staunch supporter of her supernatural ability, defended it thusly : Yes, I’m 25 years old and my mother is still alive and has no rare blood diseases that I know of. But my psychic never said “When I was 23 years OLD, she just said when I was 23. So it might be when I’m number 23 in a race, or I have number 23 on my jersey or any number of things.”

Many so called “Psychics” thrive on just this sort of ambiguity.