But there was another quality to seeing Ramtha. There was the considerable fee, and the strict timetable, and the theatrical flourish with which the medium entered and left the room. This was star treatment and star expense, and it provoked a lot of uneasy questions about spiritualism and commerce.
So I still didn’t know what to make of this trance-medium business. And then, in 1984, I heard that a trance medium named Gary was doing readings for people in Los Angeles. I arranged to meet him.
Gary was a shy, quiet, athletic man in his thirties. He explained that his method of working was not what people usually imagined when they thought of trance mediums. When he went into a trance, he said he accessed something called the Akashic Records. By looking into these records, he said he had access to any knowledge in the world, past, present, or future. This was how he explained it.
In practice, Gary lay down on a sofa, took a few deep breaths, and entered a seemingly light trance. When he began to speak, his voice was sleepy, but otherwise not strikingly different from his normal voice. He didn’t open his eyes, and his body remained reclining. Gary did not dramatically take on a new persona. He just lay on the sofa and talked to you. But in his trance he spoke with uncanny confidence and disturbing psychological acuity. After he got through confronting me for an hour, he’d come out of the trance, rub his eyes, blink, and ask mildly if things had gone all right.
I liked Gary, and saw him several times, and then went on to other things.
But then, in the fall of 1985, Gary decided to teach other people how to channel for themselves. This interested me, and I arranged to learn under his direction. As it turned out, it happened quickly.
I lay on my back with my eyes closed, and Gary spoke quietly to me, guiding a meditation intended to relax me ever more deeply. Over a period of perhaps twenty minutes, my body sank into a profound relaxation, until I was no longer really aware of my limbs at all. It was as if I was at the edge of sleep. But as I relaxed further, I felt my body paradoxically start to become tense and rigid. My hands and feet felt frozen, immovable.
At the same time this rigidity set in, I became intensely aware of sounds and events around me, not only in the immediate room but also in the entire house, and the street outside. This heightened awareness was a little like the hypersensitivity that people with migraine headaches describe. It was very acute, slightly irritating.
Gary was moving around the room. I heard him moving and wished he would not, and I felt a strange kind of inner conviction, and I heard this faraway, sleepy voice say, “Gary, sit down.”
Gary sat down.
I couldn’t see him, but I knew he had. I felt it.
I proceeded to tell him some things that were troubling him. I felt absolutely convinced of what I was saying: I knew I was right. Gary then asked me some questions about a woman he knew in Boston. I gave my impressions. All the while, some part of me was shouting, How can you know about some woman in Boston? Shut up, you’re making a fool of yourself, but I gave my impressions anyway.
I say “I” gave my impressions, although that isn’t quite right. I (the present writer, I) don’t really know how to explain the feeling that I experience during channeling. The feeling is this:
There is an awareness present inside a stiff, tense body. The usual awareness called “Michael,” my ego or whatever you want to call it, I experience as a thin coating on the outside of my body, like a coat of spray paint. So “Michael” is pushed away from the center. Sometimes I imagine that “Michael” is in my big toe. It doesn’t seem to matter where he is, just so he gets out of the way.
Meanwhile, in the center of the body, some other awareness is speaking and answering. This awareness has no name, no past, no embodiment, no emotions, no interests. It’s just a naked awareness. And it is very sure of what it is saying. It speaks of Michael as if Michael were another person, or a very small part of itself. It often has to make decisions about what to say, based on its sense of what the listener can understand; these decisions are rather like translating. And sometimes the awareness has to deal with the displaced “Michael,” who may suddenly start to be embarrassed by what is being said, or worried the awareness can’t know what it is saying. The rest of the time “Michael” is absent, or at least not intrusive.
Now, all this may sound peculiar, but in fact during a channeling session it seems about as ordinary as cooking dinner, watching television, something like that. Only when it comes time to re-emerge is there a recognition of how deep the state really is. It is not so easy to come out of it; sometimes it takes a few minutes.
After the first time I channeled, I remembered everything that I had said in the trance state. Gary had always claimed that he never remembered what he said in a session. Now I could see he hadn’t told the truth. When I confronted him, he admitted that he remembered more than he said. But he also told me, “Just wait a while.”
And, sure enough, after a few more channeling sessions, I began to realize that I was losing the information. It decayed like a dream. For the first moments after I came out, I could remember the whole session easily. But immediately the memory began to fade. After an hour, I had trouble recalling it except in general terms. After a week, I didn’t remember much at all. Sometimes I even forgot I had channeled for someone in the first place.
There seemed no reason to hold on to the information. It wasn’t any use to me. If someone wanted to know about her boyfriend’s health, what use was that to me? There was no point to keeping it in memory, and I didn’t.
And the channeling awareness itself was extremely uncurious. Sometimes, when I channeled for people I knew, “Michael” would anticipate a little voyeuristic thrill, hearing the questions. But there never was a thrill. The channel was dead to gossipy feelings. Everything was just the way it was. The only effort in channeling was the effort of explanation, and the only emotion was compassion.
When I first began to channel, I wondered why it was so easy for me, and I suspected that it had some similarity to the state I am in when writing. I’ve spent a lot of my life writing, so that is a familiar state.
A psychiatrist friend, Judith, said, “I’m not surprised at all that you are channeling, because you must channel when you write. But who or what are you channeling? Did you ask that?”
“Who or what?”
“Well,” Judith said, “is it an entity, or a spirit, or a part of yourself, or what?”
“I don’t know,” I said. That question had never occurred to me. I called Gary up. “What am I channeling?”
“I am teaching you to channel your higher self,” Gary said.
“What’s that?”
“I just call it the higher self, and it seems to be a wise part of yourself, but otherwise I don’t know what it is.”
I wanted more information; I called my friend Stephen. “Well,” he said, “what you are doing would be called different things in different historical periods, and would be explained different ways, but the fact that you are doing it, that doesn’t surprise me.”
I was tremendously excited about channeling during the first couple of weeks. I channeled for Anne-Marie. I channeled for people in my office. I channeled for other friends. I tried channeling while in different physical conditions: with my eyes open, while walking around, while standing in the shower. I was very experimental; it was fun to try.
I discovered only one major disappointment. Although I could channel for other people who asked me questions, I couldn’t do it for myself. This was frustrating. I felt as if I had received a wonderful inheritance that I couldn’t spend on myself. Finally Lisa, in my office, said, “Tell me what questions you want asked, and I’ll ask them for you.”
That seemed like a strange idea, but it worked fine. The channel would talk about Michael and give all sorts of useful answers. Here is a partial transcript of one session:
Q: Why can’t Michael find a house?
A: He feels his possibilities are limited, he has a feeling of hopele
ssness, he feels that he can’t get what he wants. The image is of a car with the gas siphoned out. He drains his own energy by failing to believe he can do better.
Q: What should he do about this?
A: He needs to make a big change. He blockades himself until he finally must confront the issue; he has no choice. It would be better to confront earlier.
Q: What is his problem writing the revisions?
A: There seems to be a lot of anxiety; his assumption about any revelation is that it will be used against him, either soon or late. This is his experience from childhood, although it is not repeated for him in adulthood.
Q: Does he need to make many revisions?
A: Nothing is necessary but the changes are beneficial. He should be doing this work quickly and not be obsessive, not change unnecessary things. He should do what really strikes him and skip the trivia.
Well, this is myself talking about myself. The first time I read what came out in the session, I was surprised and slightly annoyed. The channeled information seemed correct to me. But if I was so smart, how come I wasn’t so smart?
I’m still not clear about that.
Eventually the novelty of channeling wore off. Like a new car: you drive it with enthusiasm for a while, and then one day it’s just a car, a thing that gets you around, a vehicle, transportation. I channeled less frequently. I stopped talking about it.
But I still understood very little about the phenomenon, and I wanted to know more. What was going on here? What was this rigid, calm, unemotional state that knew all the answers?
In part, to get some understanding of the state—or states, or whatever it was—I continued to work with Gary. We worked almost every week, trying different things. Guided imagery. Astral travel. Past-life recollection.
Sometimes I had powerful experiences, comparable to drug-induced trances. Sometimes I just had a nice meditation. Sometimes I thought, You’ve been in California too long, Michael, and you’ve gone from a perfectly okay doctor to some guy who lies on a couch while somebody puts crystals on him and you actually think it means something, but it’s nothing but a lot of hippie-dippy airy-fairy baloney. New Age Garbage, Aquarian Abracadabra, Karmic Crap. Get out now, Michael, before it’s too late. Get out before you really start to believe this stuff.
But the thing is, I was having a really interesting time. And I thought intermittent panicky skepticism was to be expected whenever you stepped off the cliff, whenever you went into some realm of experience that wasn’t modeled and accepted and approved and stuck into a nice frame by society at large.
Anyway, self-doubt was nothing new to me. As it turned out, I experienced my strongest doubts about the possibility of past lives.
One day Gary proposed I do a past-life regression. I said okay. I’d never tried that. It was a trendy thing to do. I might as well get it over with. I agreed to try to recall one.
Gary induced me into an altered state with tapes and a guided meditation. When I was deeply under, he said, “Now just let images come to you, images or sensations from another lifetime.”
Another Lifetime. It sounded like the title of a soap opera. Oh boy, I thought, I don’t know if I can keep a straight face for this one.
“Just let it come in,” Gary said.
With startling suddenness, I saw the Colosseum in Rome. But not the crumbling concentric rings that you ordinarily see in pictures. I was beneath the Colosseum, in the twisting passages and tiny dark rooms that the gladiators inhabited.
I was a gladiator.
“What’s going on?” Gary said.
“I’m in Rome.”
I smelled the odors of the arena, blood and sand and animal excrement. Above me I heard the roar of the crowd, the stomping feet. I felt the heat of the day in my tiny, oppressive cell as I waited.
About this time, a tiny voice inside my head cut in and said, Sure, Michael, just like Kirk Douglas in Spartacus. How many times did you see that one? Give me a break.
Gary said, “Where in Rome?”
“The Colosseum.”
“How does it feel?”
“I’m very strong.”
I was aware of my enormous body, my great physical strength. I was startled to feel genuine pleasure at having a large body, to feel proud of it and not to be embarrassed by it, as I was in real life. Here in the Colosseum, I needed this body, I needed to rely on it. But this was also a different body, hard, heavily muscled, dark-skinned. And I felt something else—a sick, tense feeling, anxiety. Adrenaline.
“I have to kill people. Kill them before they kill me.”
“And how does that feel?”
“It doesn’t matter, I have to do it or I will be killed. I have to kill them first. It is my job.”
The voice inside my head said, Sure, Michael, this is the perfect fantasy for you, the perfect way to explain your withdrawn and defensive nature. This isn’t any past life. It’s just a fantasy, and it fits you like a Freudian glove.
Gary said, “Do you know the people you are fighting?”
“I don’t want to know them. I may have to kill them.”
“Are you afraid to die?”
“No.”
I was surprised to realize this was true. I felt great tension but no fear. There was a kind of blankness when I considered the possibility that I might myself be killed in the future. I didn’t seem to have much skill at visualizing.
“How many people have you killed?”
“It … doesn’t matter.”
There was a blankness to the past, too. No recollection of past fights in the arena. No thinking of the past at all. No future, no past. Just sitting in my cell, waiting to be called to fight. Hearing the crowd. A shout: something must have happened. Waiting.
“It doesn’t sound like a very nice life.”
I wanted to beat Gary’s head in. Why didn’t he shut up? What was the point of this psychological posturing? I had a job to do, plain and simple. His talk only weakened me. There weren’t any choices. Kill or be killed. Everything else was crap.
“Do you have women?”
“Sometimes.”
They supplied women to the fighters. Prostitutes. Hard women. Sometimes rich women came to amuse themselves.
“And how do you feel about the women?”
“I have no feeling.”
There was nothing to feel. Gary didn’t understand: he was speaking from another world, a soft world. Here in Rome I felt nothing except my size and my strength and my certainty that I would win. There was nothing else to feel. There was no room for anything else.
“That must not be pleasant, to have no feelings.”
“There’s nothing wrong with me.”
“I didn’t say there was.”
“Why don’t you shut up?” I said.
“How long have you been a gladiator?” Gary said.
“All my life.”
I was a slave in Tunisia. I was sent to Rome, and when I grew so large I was sold as a gladiator. I had won many fights. I was nineteen. I had lived that long.
The voice cut in, Make it as detailed as you want, Michael, it’s still just your own fantasy, this has nothing to do with any past life.
“What will happen to you?” Gary said.
“I will die.”
“How?”
“A lion.”
“What do you feel about that death?”
“I have no feeling.”
And I didn’t. It was an encounter, fatigue, a mistake, nothing more. There was nothing to have a feeling about. It was just animal interaction. Two animals together.
“What do you think of your life as a gladiator?”
Gary was boring. Stupid, effete, not understanding the realities. Sometimes these people came and sat with you before you fought, watching you, feeling what it was like to spend time with a man who might soon die. You were supposed to make conversation. I never would. “I’m not going to talk to you any more,” I said.
We ended the session.
/> When I came out, Gary asked me what I thought of the session. I said that it just seemed the kind of detailed fantasy any decent student of Latin could come up with on short notice. I had had four years of Latin.
“I thought it was pretty genuine,” Gary said.
“Gary, I’m a writer, for God’s sake. I make up fantasies for a living. I do it all the time. I’m good at it. This wasn’t a past life.”
I certainly believed that this gladiator fantasy had value—as an expression of a way I often felt. I was very clear that from time to time I felt myself in great danger from other people, that I needed to block off any feeling of sympathy toward them, because I saw myself in combat with them and needed to be able to kill them, at least symbolically, without qualms. That kind of psychological armoring was a personal problem that I was aware of. To see it take this form was not surprising.
I didn’t believe it was any past life.
“I don’t know, this was pretty convincing,” Gary said. “Your manner was pretty convincing. Once or twice I thought you were going to hit me.”
I told him I was sure it was just a fantasy.
And that is what I feel today. The kind of evidence that I have seen for clairvoyance or telepathy—evidence that leads me to accept these phenomena as unquestionably real—I have not experienced for the idea of past lives. It may be there. But I haven’t experienced it. No event in my life convinces me that I have lived before.
Or, to put it another way: if the ability to enter into the persona of a long-dead person is a genuine phenomenon—if such things are really possible—it still does not necessarily imply that we are recalling past incarnations. There are other possible explanations.
* * *
One day Gary suggested I try astral travel. “Why not?” I said. I was ready for anything, except more past lives.
Of course, astral travel was equally trendy, but I had had more experience with the idea of “out-of-body experiences.” I had done such things since childhood, when quite by accident I discovered I could shift my awareness out of my body and move it around the bedroom. The most comfortable place seemed to be a corner of the ceiling, looking down on myself. But I could also send my awareness outside, and roam around the backyard, or through the house, if I didn’t mind the feeling that I was snooping on other people.