poetry and precognition

By Sandy Wiener

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To our Yale personal story group,

I appreciate these motivations to get into subjects that might otherwise disappear.

So here I go, off on a new tangent.

A few of you know of my strong interest in subjects like consciousness as a field, precognition (for me the most extraordinary), clairvoyance, energy healing… many others. What the science is, the reality, behind them.

How did this take hold in me, after a thoroughly left brain upbringing, education, and career?

The journey started in the early 1970s. I was living in NYC’s East Village, a dropout period for me. A friend told me his good friend was giving a poetry reading at St. Mark’s in the Bowery, across the street from my apartment at Second Avenue and 11th street (one bedroom, $225 a month).

I attended, talked with Kathleen afterwards, and was smitten. We spent a good night together before she left the next day for San Francisco. She was poet-in-residence at San Francisco State.

We then wrote letters that crossed in the mail (of course, no email back then, how nice).

With the result that soon I flew to San Francisco for a New Year’s visit.

Getting now to precognition, clairvoyance and all. One evening, Kathleen suggested we go to the symphony concert – but it was sold out.

So we went instead to her psychic. I arrived with my radar full out for tricks and such. Not to be.

In the anteroom I chose a number, and then we went into the main room, where the psychic was answering questions from about 20 people in the audience. At one point she said, This is for (my number). Then she answered precisely the two questions I held in my mind (we were allowed three, and she had no way of knowing I did not have a third).

This could not have happened. But it did!

Back in NYC, I heard about a series of experiments being carried out at Maimonides Hospital by HEW (which I’m pretty sure was a front for CIA money, this being back in the days when Russians were supposedly getting way ahead of us in this realm).

The study was to determine if psychic energies could more easily emerge when our normal senses were dulled. I volunteered

Not to go into details, but in the first experiment I got a huge “hit.” So they invited me out again for a different experiment, and I got a bigger “hit.” So they invited me out for their dream lab, where for five nights I was awakened whenever I had a dream. They recorded what I could remember of it, to see if it would correlate with the subject of a video that my partner had watched earlier.

I was too busy in NYC to go much further with all this (businesses and young family), except for reading.

But when we moved to Ann Arbor, 30 years ago, I had more time. I began to meet people here who were not faking it or who had private agendas. But who have had experiences not explainable by our normal scientific, often old-fashioned methods.

I also found out about the Noetic Sciences organization and about the Society for Scientific Exploration (mainly scientists, but they let me join). Each has a national organization that meets yearly, and we have a local group for each that meets monthly.

These are gatherings of persons who have carried out the scientific experiments (SSE). Or who have been drawn in by their experiences (Noetic Sciences).

For me, the fascination comes from the inherent interest of the subjects. And from the opening up of wonderful mysteries that abound in our world. What, Who, Why am I?

Okay, a coda to the beginning of this story. Kathleen and I never communicated afterwards (these things happen). But the mutual friend told me later that my visit was the subject of a section in her latest book of poetry (New Shoes, by Kathleen Fraser).
 

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