This essay is excerpted from 2013: Raising the Earth to the Next Vibration, recently published by North Atlantic Books.
The first task in my new course at the Berkeley Psychic Institute, Psychic Healing 1, is to acquire a healing master. In mild trance the entire class undertakes this activity simultaneously. Apparently our young teacher Petra already contacted a number of spirits on the other side and has gotten some of them to agree to work with us. They will come out of the BPI lodge in the sky and stand on a platform behind us. We are to recognize our own master and choose or be chosen by him (psychic vision is nondirectional).
We all close our eyes and visualize this situation. The key is not just to make something up but to see.
My healing master was at first only a zigzag exiting a colonnaded temple. The fragmentation came from my attempt to be honest to what I experienced rather than to invent a character. All I saw was an unformed shape, so I decided to go with it.
We were next taught to address our healing master and remind him (or her) of the ground rules, not only when signing on but at each session thereafter: "Come only when I call you; connect only to my hands; match the vibration of the person I am healing; give me the same healing you give to the healee; depart when I instruct you to."
The surprise is that, for psychic healing, we ourselves do not train or acquire any therapeutic techniques. The healing master, guiding our hands, does it all.
We begin by practicing on each other. There are no instructions for the exercise. Receptivity to the healing master is the only protocol. However, we follow an itinerary of mostly standard mudras. First we circulate our hands through the layers of the healee’s aura; then we treat the individual layers by smoothing their energies and removing strings, knots, and drek (particularly the sticky and tar-like ones called wacks); then we balance the chakras and irrigate the energy channels; then we exorcise invading and hitchhiking spirits; then we patch the grounding cord and bring the subject into present time; then, if it declares itself as necessary, we heal the person’s relationships and self-esteem. We close by having the healee make a gold sun, hold it above his or her head, and take a bath in it while we do the same. Sometimes it is advisable to take two or three such gold-sun showers to complete the healing.
I repeat: there is no concordat for how to accomplish any of these tasks. It is a matter of contacting the healing guide, reminding him of the ground rules, and then having him or her move us like psychic marionettes from the other side.
Despite the lay of the land, everyone is sneaking glimpses to cop procedures. We discover each other doing quite different things: some are slow and smooth in their movements; others are wild and acrobatic as if juggling invisible balls while shooing dogs. Still others are untying invisible knots and adjusting the output of phantom faucets.
In truth, we have all had substantial coaching on what a healing should look like. Each evening in a large room the advanced clairvoyant students conduct psychic healings on all attendees of the various courses, sort of like showering before entering the swimming pool; only, the shower is invisible and a disembodied spirit does the honors.
We are required to arrive a half hour early for this ablution. As we gather in the central room, the day’s emcee assesses the situation energetically and then assigns a clairvoyant seminarian to each arriving student. Ten minutes may pass during which most of the adepts are sitting in trance; we wait, obediently running our energy and replacing our grounding cords.
Once assigned, our healer asks with ritual formality, "Would you like a healing?" The answer is always affirmative. Then: "Do you have any special requests?" These can be physical, emotional, spiritual, or situational. Most often, though, that answer is no.
Ostensibly guided by their own healing masters, these graduate-level practitioners are usually quite dramatic in their routines, pawing away at our auras like bears trying to knock rotten fruits out of trees and seamstresses patching torn clothes. They make swimming strokes, squiggles, banishment gestures, and sharp erasures. Some of them look like traffic cops handling eight directions coming into a rotary.
No such kind of performance passes from my healing master to me. I am modest and cautious in my gestures, feeling mainly for the master’s energetic presence and intent, occasionally plucking at something warm or dense; I try to hold my visualization of his shape. By comparison most of my classmates are boogieing.
During Q & A I ask Petra how I am to tell the difference between my impulses to copy the advanced students’ gestures and the guidance of my own healing master.
"Ask your healing master." In fact, this is her answer to pretty much every question.
By the fourth week I was still struggling, so I expressed my concern at the beginning of class to Reverend Frank, our instructor that night. He recommended that I change healing masters: "If you can’t communicate with him, then he is not an appropriate guide for you." He added that I should confirm with Petra before making a permanent switch.
I visited the BPI lodge and immediately met up with a bear sized skunk, so I enlisted him for the rest of the evening.
I told Petra about this at the start of the next session, and she said I could work with the skunk for now but she would keep an eye on our interaction. At the end of the class she concluded, "He’s fine for you, a good healing master."
Two weeks later, though, she startled me after an exercise by chiding, "You should value yourself enough by now to merit a true human healing master." Her words instantly transformed my skunk into a dignified shaman in skunk robes–in fact, he had been so all along.
During the Q & A of a subsequent session I mentioned my concern that I was disturbing the healing master: "Doesn’t he have better things to do than be summoned at a moment’s notice from his business by a cloddy amateur like me?"
My classmates smiled, and a few nodded.
"No," she asserted. "Your healing master has nothing more important to do than work with you. It is a privilege to be invited to assist someone who has a body because that is the way in which he remembers what it is like to have a body and also how he prepares to get a body again."
Aha, my master assists my healing education and does my bidding loyally and selflessly because he needs to use my body as a gateway between worlds. He wants to recall how to incarnate, how to get one of these rigs again.
After all, a body is not a mere costume or piece of hardware, nor a compliant golem to feed and order about; it is an active process, a way to conduct spiritual and psychic energy holographically, a coiling of chakras that holds shapes and refuels itself from the cosmos, an Adamic grounding of subtle vibrations and cosmic waves around a densifying rod of spiraling fields and synapsing threads like the one I have. A body may be a ghost made karmically of atoms, but it is also a presence created from a semblance. It may not be permanent or concrete, but it is real enough for psychic development and training during a life.
This is the carnal yoga that my healing master seeks to relearn from me. Where he is, he no longer can receive hard lines of sensory data or see dense forms. He takes in perceptions only through metapathic organs. To use my body he needs my permission. Of course he can intervene without it, but that will make other problems for him, logistic, karmic, and ethical.
"And you are not disturbing him anyway," Petra adds, "because he does not exist in time and space."
"Got it."
From 2013: Raising the Earth to the Next Vibration by Richard Grossinger, published by North Atlantic Books, copyright © 2010 by Richard Grossinger. Reprinted by permission of publisher.
Image by kinoko powfox, courtesy of Creative Commons license.
