Transpersonal Counseling For Intrusive Psychic Experiences

Henry Reed, Ph.D.

It was to be an ordinary shopping trip, but as Alice (not her real name) stepped out the door with her husband, she suddenly was full of panic. She couldn’t bear the thought of leaving home. Not an agoraphobic by any means, the sudden intense anxiety caught her off guard. She found herself Worrying to her husband, "We’ll be out in the street with no belongings! We’ll lose everything." Neither she nor her husband knew what she might be talking about, but her fear was real. Her husband tried to calm her, tried to induce her to go on the shopping trip as planned. They’d only be gone a little while. Finally, she consented, as she couldn’t figure out why she was so worried. Out they went and home they returned, with no incident, except that her sense of foreboding never left her. She remained vaguely anxious until she watched the evening news. There on TV she saw her fear made manifest. She watched people standing in the streets, homeless, without belongings, victims of the Oakland fire. As soon as she saw the news, saw her imagined fears real on TV, her anxiety left. Her mood lifted and her thoughts shifted. She experienced a sense of relief at not having to worry any more and focused on the plight of the poor people whose homes had burned down.

This incident wasn’t the first time such a thing happened to Alice, nor is she the only one with such a story.

Martha was headed out to do her routine laundry at the public laundromat. This time, however, she felt nervous about going. She kept getting visions of a gun going off, feeling herself shot or hurt, hit in the head. She knew that she had had fears of the laundromat, especially at night, as it was now. She thought she had worked through those fears. There had been no incidents of terror at that laundromat, nor at any other in her city, as far as she knew. She had vowed not to let anxiety stand in her way* Yet tonight was different, somehow. She felt she was getting some kind of psychic message to stay away. Yet it seemed just like fear, and she didn’t want to let it determine her action. Finally, after driving around the neighborhood .several times, she was able to drop off her clothes in the washing machines, but instead of staying there, she drove off and went for a drive. No sense being caught in a routine, she rationalized. Around nine o’clock the feeling of dread left her and she went back to the laundromat to put the clothes in the dryer without a thought or worry. She never gave it another thought until the next day when a friend called her with some disturbing news. The night before, a man they knew had been shot in the head and killed while in a neighborhood store. The news jolted Martha. It was the second time she had been hit in the head by that crime.

Experiences like Alice’s and Martha’s are not rare. The Edgar Cayce Foundation receives many phone calls and letters from people who are plagued by such experiences. Over the years the requests for aid overwhelmed this small organization. It was not prepared to help these people beyond giving out information. In the late 1970s, for example, when records were still maintained about the number and types of letters and calls received, it was estimated that it was on the order of ten a month. For a project designed to see if a new counseling process would help such people, Henry Reed placed an ad in Venture Inward Magazine.

"Do you sometimes have premonitions or precognitive dreams of disasters that later come true? Do you seem to be psychically attuned to the illnesses, sufferings or misadventures of friends, loved ones, or even strangers? Some people have a pattern of psychic experiences that deal primarily with negative events and which are disruptive to the person having them. Research may uncover ways of helping such people rid themselves of Such unwanted psychic experiences. If you’ve had such disturbing psychic experiences and are willing to be interviewed for the purposes of research, please write and describe the nature of your experiences."

Many people responded to the ad. Henry enlisted the aid of Jo McAnulty, psychic and parapsychologist and a recent graduate of West Georgia College’s program in humanistic parapsychology, who wrote to the people, interviewed some, and created the Battered Boundaries newsletter to promote a self-help network for people with these kinds of problems. Laura Miller, a student at Atlantic University, took the ball from Jo and helped take the project to its next step.

At A.R.E.’s annual Psychic Development Training and Research Conference, Laura led a special support group for Battered Boundaries. This daily group allowed conference participants to share their personal experiences. In a confidential and nurturing environment, they were able to describe the unusual events that had disturbed them. To give the group some background, Laura related her own experience with disruptive psychic phenomena:

"My intrusive experiences began after the death of my father and the suicide of a dear friend. They continued over a two year period. I was fortunate enough to have a friend who began having similar experiences around the same time. During this period of doubt, confusion and fear, we were grateful to have each other to talk to. Though neither of us could understand the nature of these experiences we came to value the comfort of sharing. There were times when we truly doubted our sanity.

"We saw sparks, flashes, and big exploding balls of light traveling through our homes. We were fascinated by these light shows," which occurred on a regular basis. We traveled all over New York City consulting with all manner of psychic consultants and readers trying to find anyone who could help us make any sense out of our two main questions: "What was happening?" and "Why is it happening to us?"

"One of the most difficult facets of this period was the pain of isolation. Many of our friends empathized with our grief but could not tune in at all to our psychic experiences. It was not until many years later when I began my studies at Atlantic University that I was able to gain a fuller understanding of our experiences. It was wisely suggested that perhaps the disturbing phenomena which we had seen all around us was directly related to the stress that was within us. It is as if they return something to me that I have lost, such as important feelings.

"My light forms have slowly begun to reappear. I now see them as tiny sparks which dance off the page when I am reading or shoot up into the air when I am listening to a speaker. I see them when moments of truth are hit. They appear to call my attention to that moment."

Laura encouraged others to share their experiences. One member mentioned that her experience wasn’t one of her own boundaries being battered, but of her dreams invading other people’s lives. She related incidents where she had dreams about people that later proved true. These dreams made her feel like a nocturnal snoop. She questioned if others could invade her own life and if she needed to consider erecting boundaries before sleep.

"Why .me?" That question is perhaps the most natural to ask when we are faced with a mysterious experience that tends to repeat itself. People who have a pattern of disturbing psychic experiences (premonitions of disasters, getting sick when other people are in trouble, etc.) ask themselves, "Why me?" It is a question begging for an answer. We seek to understand the meaning of the experience. We want to understand the personal meaning of the experience in terms of its relationship to aspects of the individual’s own life and development.

At the battered boundaries group meetings, we tested out with the people our developing orientation to answer this question. It was based upon two concepts from the Cayce readings.

The first principle is that all you meet is self. Cayce used this principle to get people to quit blaming circumstances and look to themselves as the source of the quality of their lives. When asked to comment upon an apparently senseless tragedy, asking "what is the meaning of this?" or "Why me?" his answer reflected his "All you meet is self" philosophy. To learn something new about yourself, to develop a new aspect of self, to confront something within yourself, that was the purpose, the meaning that could be abstracted from the experience.

Applying that philosophy to the case of disturbing psychic experiences, then, it would seem that it would be that a disturbing experience was something like a dream, it was a symbolic mirror of self. If a person has a vision of a murder, feels terrified by it, is afraid of being killed, then discovers that the murder happened to someone else, the meaning of the experience is to be found by interpreting the vision as one would a dream. The person perhaps suffers from self-hatred, self-condemnation. The person suffers violence upon themselves. The disturbing psychic experience is somewhat like "the return of the repressed," bringing an experience that offers the person an opportunity to reunite with an aspect of self that comes perhaps as a teacher.

Cayce used two ideas in answering questions about disturbing psychic experiences. One had to do with the integrity of the physical body. Like a hole in the ozone layer of the psyche, there could be accidents that would create psychic openings, holes in the aura. Like with Peter Hurkos who became suddenly psychic after a fall. And then the other was "affinity" or "like attracts like." That is, once there is an opening, what will come in? Well what comes in will match what is inside. Perhaps the disturbing psychic experience is actually an opportunity to experience self vicariously, to bring a piece of oneself back home.

At the Battered Boundaries meetings we helped participants explore how their own disturbing experiences might be trying to teach them something. We had one interesting event happen right at the conference itself. At one of the Battered Boundaries meetings, Jackie described how when Ewing sat down next to her at one of the conference activities, she felt like running away. She couldn’t explain her strong wish to avoid this man she had never seen before. Later, at the Battered Boundaries meeting, Ewing told about his home situation, caring for his wife whose life was crumbling under the devastation of Alzheimer’s Disease. He had been struggling with his feelings of loss and anger and also his feelings, which he felt to be selfish, of being a prisoner himself of the disease, for he had not been able to live a normal life since he had begun his caretaker role. Jackie was touched by Ewing’s story, for she had been going through a similar experience. She had recently returned home from her job in another country because of her mother’s incapacitating stroke. She too had been struggling with feelings of loss and anger as well as guilt for resenting being a prisoner of her mother’s disease. Jackie and Ewing had certain important feelings in common. Was that what Jackie felt when Ewing sat next to her? Their commonalities seemed to explain Jackie’s unwanted psychic sensitivity to Ewing. As the conference progressed, Jackie and Ewing shared more and facilitated each other’s healing.

Some of the people’s stories seemed beyond resolution and spurred us on to further exploration. For example, Madge told how she had gone away on vacation and had a dream of a child who was kidnapped and mutilated. In her dream she called the young girl by name and held her for awhile after the brutal incident and protected her from a dog who came upon them. When she returned home from her vacation, the local newspaper had a front page story of a child murder that matched her dream, even to the extent of the child’s name. Later she learned that it was a dog that discovered the girl’s body. She said that a psychic had told her that the child’s soul had cried out for help and she was there. Madge said she could accept this explanation but wanted to know more.

To further pursue this work beyond the conference, Henry created at Atlantic University a special class on transpersonal counseling. In that class we focused on the problem of people with disturbing psychic experiences. The clients came from a pool of people who had participated in the Battered Boundaries network, either writing asking for help or participating in our group at the conference. Ten people from a wide variety of backgrounds enrolled as student counselors in what was to be an adventure in self-discovery and healing.

Transpersonal counseling has as its foundation the archetype of the "wounded healer," which dates back to the ancient Greek mysteries of temple medicine. By following the advice, "Physician, heal thyself," the aspiring healer grows in ability to heal others. Edgar Cayce came into his gifts, for example, through trying to heal his throat problem. The students in our class were not expected to be experts in healing, but rather, by being on a path of self- discovery, growth, and healing, they were seen as capable of helping others even as they were helped themselves.

Following the "all you meet is self" philosophy of transpersonal mirroring favored by Edgar Cayce, the students viewed their clients as "aspects of self," or some part of themselves that was seeking help. They were helping themselves as much as their clients. It was understood that their clients might help them, too. Unlike traditional models of therapy, where the therapist acts aloof or apart from the client, in this approach to counseling, the counselor is humble and is open to receive healing from the client.

From the very start Henry asked the students to include psychic ability as part of their counseling skill. They used psychometry to select their clients. They prayed to be guided to choose that client that they could best help, to have a student-client pairing which would provide the most growth and healing for both parties. They held the clients’ letters and chose the letter they felt most drawn to. The synchronicities that resulted were astounding and gave a blessing to the beginning of our project. Jennifer, for example, the only musician among the students, psychically chose the letter of the only musician in the group of clients.

The next step was for each student to write down any impressions, feelings, images, etc., that were received while holding the still unread letter of their chosen client. They then each incubated a dream for their chosen client and wrote a letter to that person, including whatever information and impressions which they felt were appropriate. In this manner, the students introduced themselves to their clients and began the healing relationship.

Another important principle within transpersonal counseling is the assumption that everything happens for a purpose. In that sense, a person’s problems is sacred. We may treat the problem, to use a spiritual metaphor from the Native Americans, as a potential "medicines," that is, as something that may help the person grow or transform. Homeopathy has a similar viewpoint, respecting an illness as nature’s way of healing. Rather than focusing on exterminating the problem, therefore, we focus on learning what it has to teach us. With regard to disturbing psychic experiences specifically, we assume these experiences are "medicine mirrors," meant to teach the person something about him or herself that has the potential of healing the person.

Finally, a transpersonal assumption about healing is that it involves some kind of transformation. Rather than simply a change in symptom status, we look for fundamental shifts in the person’s orientation. We hoped, for example, that our clients might become transformed from an unwitting and involuntary psychic who is beset by disturbing experiences into someone who could use their psychic ability in an intentional and constructive manner.

This transpersonal philosophy was also expressed in our approach to the healing methodology. The disturbing psychic experience is a message that was still unopened. The medicine remained undigested. Listening and meditation, therefore, were the main healing methodologies. The treatment plan had two parts: a special daily meditation between counselor and client, and a weekly telephone conversation between the two.

The treatment began with the conversation. Listening was the essential active ingredient of helping. Active listening is a process of reflecting back to the client what the counselor hears that person saying. It can be very gratifying for a person to feel that they have been truly heard. The theory is that by reflecting back in an accepting manner, it helps the client become more aware of their feelings and attitudes. This process of reflecting, or mirroring, follows the transpersonal, homeopathic theory that if the client truly hears what is coming from within themselves, if they can recognize the message of their symptoms, then these symptoms can be relieved of their job.

To prepare the student counselors for their listening ministry, Henry had them practice an exercise in listening to oneself on paper. Jennifer prepared an example of that form of reflective listening to demonstrate the method:

Me: A valuable skill I learned in Henry Reed’s counseling class was reflective listening

Reflective Listener: You feel that reflective listening can be a valuable skill?

Me: Absolutely. It’s so simple: I deeply listen to what the person says, and mirror it back to them in a non-judgmental way.

RL: Let me see if I understand what you are saying You listen to the person, and repeat back what they say?

ME: I try to say back to them the gist of what I heard, to let them know that I am paying attention to what they are trying to communicate, and to let them correct any misperceptions I might have had.

RL: It sounds like you show the person that you are really interested in the meaning of their words.

ME’ I try to. This can give them the confidence to look deeper and express the feelings that may lie behind their words.

RL: Do I understand that you’re saying that listening to someone reflectively can allow them to get in touch with something deeper?

ME: Exactly. This is so much more helpful than giving advice or trying to smooth away fears or worries, because it gives the person a chance to discover and express the origins of their emotion or conflict.

RL: So, you feel that reflective listening encourages your client to participate more fully in their inner exploration and healing process.

ME: Yes, but I wouldn’t limit it to clients; it can be invaluable in any situation where someone needs to be heard. For example, if I find that someone is angrily shouting at me, and I feel I am blameless, shouting back my innocence would most likely only escalate their anger. Instead, stopping and saying "I hear that you are angry" can defuse their anger and give them a chance to explain what they feel hurt or fearful about.

RL: I can see how reflective listening can be a valuable skill for all of us to use. It could be helpful in all our relationships. Thank you for sharing this healing mode with me.

ME: Thank you. I appreciate feeling that you value me and what I have to say.

After the students practiced reflective listening with themselves using that journal writing exercise, they began to use it to become helpful colleagues with the other students in class. Each student was given the opportunity to be in a "client" and in a "therapist" role with each other. Being a client is good training for being a therapist. In the recent film, The Doctor, when the aloof doctor comes to know what it is like to be on the receiving end of a doctor’s ministrations, it changes the doctor into a caring healer. Getting to experience the client role hopefully would eliminate the attitude of "I’M okay, but you’re not" that is an inherent danger in taking on only the therapist’s role. Synchronicity was invoked again as each student drew out the name and phone number of the student who would play the role of their "therapist" for two weeks. The student client would phone the student therapist for a counseling session. The therapist was only to listen and reflect back what the student client said. This training period prepared the students for their healing conversations with the real clients.

By that time, the real clients had received letters from their student counselors explaining the counseling project for disturbing psychic experiences. A telephone meeting was arranged. Each student had a telephone conversation with their client, using the active listening skills’ to help the client explore the meaning of their disturbing psychic experience. After about two weeks, the student counselor explained to the client the second part of the treatment plan, involving the special daily meditation.

Edgar Cayce had once suggested that if people wanted to find the "key to telepathy," they should arrange with a friend to set aside a few minutes at the same time each day and tune into what the other was doing. Based on that general suggestion, Henry had developed a step-by-step procedure for people to follow. He adapted the face-to-face imaginal encounter, "Close to You" for use at a distance. He had tested it with participants in his ongoing Psychic Development Training conferences and found that it not only demonstrated the existence of telepathy, it also created a healing bond between the two partners. They telepathically tuned into aspects of the other person’s life that correlated with some issue going on in their own, thus promoting some significant telephone conversations of an intimate and healing nature.

To adapt this procedure for our counseling project, the student counselor and the client recorded an audio cassette for each other’s use. They each read aloud a prepared script that contained suggestions for quieting the mind and tuning into the sound of speaker’s voice. Using the voice as the point of attunement it was suggested that the listener would then follow their stream of thought and imagery and note down impressions about their partner who was reading the script. In this way, the counselor and the client tuned into each other daily and noted impressions about the other. At the end of the first week of this meditation, the client mailed the week’s worth of impressions to the student counselor. Then they had a phone conference.

The theory behind this treatment plan was as follows: The client is suffering from disturbing psychic experiences. Their psychic ability, in other words, is out of control. Rather than functioning in response to conscious intentions, it is functioning in a more dream-like fashion. That is, it is presenting extreme situations (based on other people’s lives), but situations that symbolically reflect aspects of self that need examining They are like disruptive nightmares, signaling the "return of the repressed," and a call for self-examination.

The Mutual Telepathic Meditation Technique is designed to accomplish two goals simultaneously. First it would harness the client’s psychic ability, turn it into a positive, constructive force. Second, based on earlier work with the method, we anticipated that each would tune into aspects of the other person’s life that reflected in some fashion, aspects of self. In other words, we would take advantage of Cayce’s principle of affinity to help locate the significant issues in the client’s life that might underlie their disturbing psychic experiences. To do so, we would note not just what the student counselor picked up on about the client, but also what issues in the counselor’s own life the client picked up on. In this mutual mirroring fashion, with the aid of the student counselor’s dedication to be helpful, perhaps the client would be able to discover and look at those aspects of self that were causing the disturbing psychic experience.

That was the theory. What happened?

First of all, appreciate that the disturbing psychic experiences that the clients had been having were indeed disturbing, even frightening. This fear was contagious. In class sessions, when the students would discuss the clients’ presenting problems, some students would report feeling nervous. It was clear that if the student counselors were to feel safe to handle these feelings, and be centered enough to be a healing influence, then we would have to rely on spiritual procedures in our class sessions. Thus we began each class with a period of meditation, and said healing prayers for one another and for the clients. As we would discuss a particular case, we would take time out periodically for the students to attune themselves for receiving spiritual guidance about that particular person. Although these procedures were initially motivated by feeling overwhelmed by the enormity of the undertaking, they had the positive side effect of demonstrating to the students that they could indeed enlist their psychic abilities toward a constructive spiritual purpose. On many occasions students received psychic impressions about another student’s client that proved accurate or helpful. The student counselors bonded into a team of colleagues, supporting and helping one another as they worked on themselves and with their clients.

As expected, there were many examples of telepathy between counselor and client as the pairs became more closely bonded. As one example, Jennifer received images of moons on the day that her client was painting moons for an art show. She also felt pain in areas of her body where her client was experiencing physical problems. She also felt the absence of her client on days that her client wasn’t meditating with her.

These telepathic connections were not all capricious. When examined closely, there were messages beneath the surface. Laura had a psychic impression of her client’s son having a tantrum in the supermarket. As it turned out, on that same day, the client did have to scold her son at the supermarket for his behavior and it got so bad she had to take him out of the store. The image of the disruptive son proved to be symbolic of the runaway emotional distress that this client experienced. This client also tuned into Laura, getting the impression of a friend who had died. She gave the friend’s name, whom Laura recognized, but the friend wasn’t dead. Three days later the person died unexpectedly. Processing this trauma, Laura realized that she and her client both had problems dealing with loss. Her client was attempting to protect Laura from the loss by warning her in advance. Loss was the core issue behind Laura’s initial psychic disturbance she had shared at the A.R.E. conference group. Her client appeared to have a similar issue and there was reason to suspect that it was behind her disturbing experiences. Laura’s experience seems to strengthen the theory that we draw people to us because of issues we ourselves still haven’t healed.

Other student counselors were having similar mirroring experiences with their clients. The mutuality of issues was a challenge, both to students and the clients. Theory was getting close to home, perhaps too close for comfort in some instances. As nerves were struck, some retreated into their counselor roles. Clients began to miss appointments and meditations. At one point the class realized they were putting more emphasis on grading their psychic ability than on healing, as if being more "psychic" could itself be the factor needed for self-validation. This realization helped the class appreciate how their clients might also have fallen into a similar predicament, holding onto the psychic aspect of their disturbing experiences as a means of self-validation while silently ignoring the self-reflective lesson hiding in the experience.

Using these classroom revelations to regain our bearings, the student counselors were sometimes able to make use of the mutuality of their client contact to guide them in helping the client as they learned more about themselves. Several counselors found that client experiences reminded them of similar experiences in their childhoods and early teen years that had significantly shaped the manner in which they saw themselves in relation to the world today. Old wounds surfaced when triggered by the interaction with their clients. The nature of the similarities provided a common ground and foundation for the healing process, providing a buffer against the pain which can often accompany a solitary breakthrough. The camaraderie proved to be a vital element in the mutual healing process. The interwoven role reversals of counselor and client took many turns as they learned how shame, guilt and pain had been fueling their inability to touch ourselves

Tara’s experience, for example, makes an excellent case study. She had as a client "Helen," a teacher who had been experiencing psychic attacks. These attacks came from an educational consultant under whom she was training, a man who had shown her some overt hostility but who had denied having any angry feelings toward her. The attacks would come at any time as jabs of pain and feelings of humiliation and at those moments Helen knew that it was that man sending her his angry feelings. The result of these traumas was that she was feeling drained and her health was deteriorating. When Tara and Helen began their mutual telepathic meditation, they quickly began having a number of synchronistic experiences. They had telepathic dreams about each other, experienced sympathy pains and in their phone discussions had a number of mutual psychological realizations.

On one occasion, Tara dreamed she was watching a scene from Out of Africa on television. At that time, Helen was reading the autobiography of the authoress of the novel on which the movie was based. The connection was not whimsical. Helen found instances in that autobiography where the authoress had suffered psychic attacks like her own.

As Tara herself reflected on the meaning of the "evils" that Helen’s novel suggested, she began to touch on memories of a different kind of "attack" that she had experienced in her childhood—abuse. With this revelation, it seemed that Tara and Helen were now in synch, that even though the specifics of their problems differed, they were each exploring a similar underlying issue. During the next three months, the two would experience several synchronicities during their mutual telepathic meditation, synchronicities that led them together on their healing quest.

On one occasion, for example, Helen accurately described a fight Tara had with her roommate, as well as the red and black mandala she drew after the fight was over. In discussing this incident, they found that they both had roommates who were taking advantage of them. They were too "nice" to do anything about it, choosing instead to live with the tension, feeling powerless. Helen and Tara worked together on why they were in this identical predicament. Tara wrote in her journal:

"We acknowledged that we had been programmed by ourselves and others to believe that anger is an undesirable trait and did not suit our calm, collected personas. Delving deeper, we found that we both had mothers who would make us feel guilty for feeling angry or depressed. Our maternal figures would instantly start professing their own ‘worse’ emotional state once we started to complain, get angry or upset. In turn, we would take on our mother’s emotions instead of feeling justified to experience our own."

Tara and Helen helped each other to learn to let out anger. They helped each other relive dreams in which they had acted passively and change their dream response to a stronger "take charge" attitude. Later dreams began to reflect a stronger dream ego and a few weeks later both experienced a resolution to their roommate situations.

In addition to synchronicities occurring in their mutual meditations and in their dreams, they actually felt the same bodily pains. Tara had injured her right hip in a yoga incident years ago. The pains had started up again, so she went to a massage therapist who informed her that the location of the pain suggested the storing of painful memories of an abusive father. Here again was the subject of childhood abuse coming to the surface. In discussing this situation with Helen, she learned that Helen too had been having a pain in the exact same spot and had recently visited a chiropractor, who also suggested that she may be carrying unresolved issues dealing with her parents, most likely her father.

Tara began having flashback dreams involving abuse by her father. She was having to deal with the dawning realization that she had been mistreated. Both Tara and Helen recognized that they had always felt rejected by their father, continually seeking love and approval from them to no avail. They recognized that the unrequited love from father had been a motivating force behind many of their shared traits such as low self-esteem and drive for achievement. Each made a quest to confront the father, either in person or in letters and fantasy. Together the women worked on releasing self-condemning patterns and thoughts that began in their childhood, replacing them with positive self-imagery.

A couple of months after the class was over, Kara and Helen were still in contact, although irregularly. Helen announced that the psychic attacks were no longer a problem. She did not feel like a helpless victim any more, but was stronger and in control of her own well-being. The psychic attacks were a form of "the return of the repressed," for they represented her own anger, feelings which she had banished. Through the transpersonal counseling work she practice with Tara, Helen was able to make medicine out of these attacks, turning them into a gift, a gift that returned to her strength and confidence. In the process, her counselor, Tara, was also enabled to grow herself. Both benefited tremendously by sharing similar issues, for as each helped the other, each helped themselves.

Other students reported varying degrees of success. One student formed such an intimate bond with her client that it became more and more difficult for her to share their mutual discoveries in the class context. Her client was "Madge," the woman who had had the dream of the murdered child. As it turned out, this dream served the purpose of returning to Madge her buried memories of torturous abuse as a child. She and her student counselor found themselves exploring very sensitive issues together, as the counselor too began to recall painful memories. Although they were able to use their bond for healing, they did not feel comfortable "going public" with what transpired between them. We do not have their story to tell. We can respect their decision. We can also recognize the pattern from past experience with the mutual telepathic meditation technique. People become closely bonded through telepathic insights at exactly those spots where they have had the most shameful feelings. Henry has termed this link the "fig leaf effect." In the Garden of Eden, it was the feelings of shame and guilt that led to the creation of the consciousness of separation. The fig leaf becomes a symbol both of shame, or self-consciousness, and separation, or the block of natural telepathy. The fig leaf effect keeps society from socially accepting ESP until it has worked through its feelings about shame and guilt and has improved self-esteem.

Many of the clients reported improved self-esteem as part of this study. Having their experiences honored by another was an important factor in helping them to feel differently about themselves and their disturbing experiences. Several also reported that their disturbing experiences had stopped. One reported that she still had premonitions of accidents and other disturbing events, but could accept that this was the way her sensitivity operated. Only one client continued to complain of ongoing disturbances, but it was unclear whether or not these complaints were also part of a pattern of discontent about life in general. The student counselor volunteered to continue working with the client but it was unclear that the client wanted to continue with the meditation.

When Edgar Cayce gave his suggestion for how we might discover the "key to telepathy" he probably did not anticipate that we could use his idea as a basis for healing. In other readings on telepathy, however, he suggested that we would learn more about it if we used it to help people. This study combined two of his ideas and may have revealed something of the what Cayce understood as the root cause of telepathic experiences. It would appear that we can telepathically draw upon another person’s experiences when their experiences has some bearing on something within ourselves. This factor would be what Cayce would have called "affinity." Disturbing psychic experiences and the mutual telepathic meditation are but two sides of the same coin. What makes them different is the intention. In the first case, we have unintentional telepathy in a situation where the person has some deficits in self-awareness that are in need of correcting. In the second case we have a situation of intentional self-examination. The intention for healing multiplies the power of the mutual telepathic effect. Because of their intent/motivation for the highest good in their mutual meditation, the counselor became a sounding-board for the client in more ways than one. The counselor opened him or herself up not only to self-examination but also examination by the client in the service of healing the client’s own alienation from self. Thus when one party was working on an issue, the other would experience or uncover the same problem within him or herself.

In an important reading Cayce suggested that we can provide no greater service to one another than to share of ourselves. Atlantic University’s Battered Boundary project, where student counselors train themselves in self-exploration so that it might aid others who are having trouble reading the reflections of self their psychic experiences are bringing, may provide an important resource to learning more about the psychic and the nature of our oneness. There was substantial agreement in class that this mutual aid approach, harvesting the leverage that telepathic affinity provides, may be a new paradigm in healing.