Do the spirits move you?

Even stopping by the table of a blue-haired, red-lipsticked tarot card reader in New York City's East Village, I am on a haft-acknowledged quest. As physician Larry Dossey, M.D., author of Prayer Is Good Medicine, puts it, "I have a passion for psychic phenomena, because they tell us we may have to think in new ways about how consciousness behaves."

He's not alone in his passion. As of this writing, Betty J. Eadie's Embraced by the Light has been on the best-seller list for 93 weeks. Television's cult hit, The X Files, reels in 8 million households per show. And Many Lives, Many Masters, the book in which psychiatrist Brian Weiss, M.D., describes the benefits of past-life therapy, has now been printed in 17 languages. At California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco, Elizabeth Targ, M.D., is overseeing a national study to determine the effect of remote prayer on healing AIDS patients. A previous study showed results that were promising enough to warrant further research.

Even the CIA came out of the closet last year with its abashed confession that the government agency had spent $20 million on psychic research in the last two decades (see "I Was a Psychic Spy," page 52). Gallup polls show that 69 percent of Americans believe in angels, half believe they have their own guardian angels, and 48 percent believe UFOs are real. Last April, Robert Miller, the governor of Nevada, renamed State Route 375 the Extraterrestrial Highway, supposedly because of the frequency of UFO sightings. Dionne Warwick's Psychic Friends Network logs 4 million minutes a month at $3.99 a minute and last spring celebrated its 10 millionth caller. Even that wonderful relic of my childhood, the Magic 8-Ball, has resurfaced, reaching record-breaking sales of a million balls a year.

Not that our culture hasn't always had a mystical bent; think Emerson and the transcendentalists. But why are we now turning to oracles in huge numbers? Who is this new "vast middle-class of credulous neospiritualists"--as Newsweek so aptly referred to them in a recent cover story?

Traveling through the Twilight Zone

As a serial monogamist, I've always been able to preserve the illusion that my psychics were better than they actually were. I got to know and like them. Above all--probably like most of us--I tended to sift out and remember only the remarkable moments. There was the time a healer and clairvoyant named Jason Schulman sat across the room from me and without knowing a single fact about my history, described down to the point of a pinhead exactly where pain was throbbing in my body, despite no outward sign to clue him in. There was the morning my friend called me before and after a phone reading with a psychic named Rochelle. He said the first words out of the visionary's mouth were, "What's this about Romania?" He and I marveled over the peculiarity of extrasensory perception--it was I who was flying to Romania the following week, not he. Had our talk about my trip that morning lingered around him, in some electromagnetic corona around his head, one that she'd picked up but not precisely?

For this article I wantonly sampled readings--eight of them in a single week---culled from friends' recommendations, books, and newspaper articles. I followed a reporters' mandate for objectivity, and so prepared myself by talking to skeptics as well as believers. And, for the first time in my life, even with a glut of readings, I came up nearly empty-handed.

I had never before compared and contrasted readings; but as soon as I did it became clear they were like verbal Rorschach prints, their interpretation dependant on the beholder. They were all different; they could all have been at least somewhat true. Then, because the senior editor of this magazine emphatically de-dared that he was "horrified" to see this subject taken seriously, we assembled a list of simple questions for the intuitives to answer: How many siblings do I have? What does my uncle do for a living? Almost uniformly, they either got the facts wrong or claimed their "guides" did not allow them to see such trivia because it had no spiritual significance, Even if I give professional seers leeway for working creatively and intuitively, for accessing a part and not a whole, I can't help wondering why it was hard for them to retrieve such simple information.