Well I'm not saying you're any more stupid than the rest of us.
We all have our follys.
But yes I'm saying you knew she was lying and chose her lies over your truths.
I mean come on EX! A spirit guide named Francine? You truly deep down thought that was actual reality?
You went looking for something different and found it.
You made a conscious decision to believe it no matter how down right silly the whole thing was.
That may not be how you remember it but how could it be otherwise.
Well, yes, as a matter of fact I did believe the whole Francine thing. I had a strong belief in psychics growing up. My concern, when I met Sylvia Browne, was whether she was a real psychic or a phony - not whether or not psychics existed.
That's not the half of it. In my late teens, I also believed in Ouija boards. I first used one in an attempt to contact my best friend who'd died in a car accident. At some point I actually believed I was under attack by dark spirits as a result of using the Ouija board. I believed I had psychic and spiritual guidance dreams. I thought I could communicate with spirit guides through dreams.
Silly? It gets even worse. I believed that Edgar Cayce was sincere and legitimate and for a long time I studied his material and tried to live by his philosophy. I was a much bigger fan of his, in fact, than I ever was of Sylvia Browne's (I had a slight distrust of Sylvia for charging such high fees, though back in the 1980s she really did have a church and staff to support and she hadn't begun to make much money yet, so that excuse actually worked back then). I was a big fan of a Native American teacher from who I learned it was possible to travel out of body, and that there were demonic entities in an ongoing battle of dark against light, which I also believed.
My grandmother was part Native American, and I believed her when she said that whenever people in our family died they appeared at the foot of her bed and the next day she would find out they had died.
My mother was a big fan of using the pendulum to foretell the future, something I also did over the years.
I believed in hands-on-healing and that we could use our minds to heal our bodies and I believed I'd actually done this. My mother taught this to me in 7th grade.
I had an aunt who was a trance channel, married to one of the smartest people I knew - my uncle, who was a mathematics major. He believed in this completely and kept detailed records of the trance material.
In later years, I came to believe in near-death-experiences and read almost everything I could get my hands on. I was a big fan of James Van Praagh and used to watch all of his shows, later to become a big fan of John Edward and George Anderson. I had all of their books.
I also studied Eastern religions and believed in reincarnation and karma and in past life regressions. I liked Dr. Brian Weiss of past life regression fame. I liked Eknath Easwaran and other Eastern writers who talked about a universal kind of spirituality and the importance of love. I liked Zen.
I practiced meditation. I worked with dreams. I worked with Tarot cards and at one point I got into astrology fairly seriously.
I used affirmations and visualization and experimented with "creating my own reality." For awhile I studied Emmet Fox and Joel Goldsmith.
I could go on and on.
But yes, I believed in the Francine thing, more or less, up until the time I discovered she seriously and ridiculously contradicted herself.
That said, I'm going to give you some background. Feel free to stop here since this post is too lengthy already. If you are interested in the background:
For me it all started, as I've said before, when my best friend was killed in a car accident when I was 17. I became obsessive about finding out what happened after death. My sister had died several years earlier.
When my best friend died, it involved a strange situation. She'd been telling me since the day we first met, around age 14, that she'd known since she was a little girl that she would not live much past the age 18. She was right. She died shortly after her 18th birthday. Her mother verified that story and told me that when they developed the pictures from her 18th birthday, the ones that she'd been in, and only those, had come back inexplicably black. My friend had taken a look at those pictures and told her mother, "See, I told you. I'm not supposed to be here." A few weeks later she was killed.
Before she died I was a pretty ordinary teenager who worried about ordinary, mudane teenager things. After her death I became obsessed with finding out what had happened to her. Where was she? Would I ever see her again? How could she have known she'd die at 18?
I turned first to a famous psychic in San Francisco. I would drive up once a month to hear this woman lecture. She taught that life is a school and when you die, you have graduated, and that it is possible to have psychic foreknowledge about one's death. I suppose you are right to say that she gave me the answer I was looking for. I used to have nightmares that my friend suffered an agonizing death, and this woman's reassurance that my friend had not suffered excruciating pain brought me a great deal of peace.
Then my mother paid for me to have a reading more locally with Sylvia Browne. I know she hoped it would help me find the answers and peace I sought. In hindsight now, of course, we laugh at what a mess that all became. But of course hindsight is 20/20.
Stupid. Ignorant. Whatever.
I'm fine with all of that.
But I can assure you that I did not know it was all lies. I was looking for answers, trying initially to fit the answers with what I knew of the weird events surrounding my friend's death, which seemed to call for a supernatural explanation in my young mind. I was searching for truth.
I still am, Brattus, only now I'm looking in a different direction.
You are free to think what you will, but please don't think I had any clue that I was being fed a bunch of lies.
Then again, of course, you are still free to think that, too.
