The Divine Transformation of Jody

        Once upon a time, Jody had an unusual paranormal experience.  She had just
gotten out of work and was in a relaxed mood.  She wasn't thinking about anything in
particular; her mind had suddenly quieted down.  Then she felt somewhat odd, as though
she was "coming to" from a dream.  Some sort of gear had shifted in her mind.
        She was walking along the street and she noticed something peculiar had happened
to a huge oak tree among a row of others on the main street of the New England village
where she lived.  It appeared as though it was on fire, not the usual kind of  blazing red and
yellow fire burning the tree to a crisp, but a subtle greenish fire that seemed to glow from
within the leaves. 
        The green-ness of the leaves had an intensity that was too bright to look straight at. 
It was rather like a bright sunset that you can almost look at but not longer than a split
second or two.  She felt like she needed special goggles to endure the brightness.  She
stopped and gawked at them in awe.  The brightness was like the light of a trillion stars
going supernova at a critical mass.
        She looked around at her at all the people rushing by to and fro lost in their trifling
worldly and wordy business.  This person was hurrying to a doctor's appointment to get x-
rays for possible breast cancer; that person had to see his accountant about more
deductions he could use on his taxes.  Jody was aghast that they could not see the
wondrous light flowing from the sheer green-ness of the leaves.  To them, they were just
ordinary leaves, so what?  To her, it was like visitations from angels of heaven!
        When she tried to look at the leaves longer than usual, she would see amazing
patterns in the streaming light.  The light invited her to sneak into another world
interpenetrating this one.  It was a bit like some weird computer graphics she'd seen on far-
out sci fi movies.  She'd see hexagons unfolding, forming into octagons, becoming
mandalas within circles within countless circles unwrapping in ever-changing geometric
formations from the continuously hypnotic center.  Jody stared with her jaw hanging slack
wide open.  She felt this experience was reminiscent of the skeptical St. Paul suddenly
being struck by a blinding light that completely changed his outlook on life.
        Jody was not a little scared about this.  She wondered if she was having some kind
of recursion of L.S.D., for this is what it reminded her of.  She hadn't taken that stuff in
some twenty years though, and that was only a couple of times under the influence of all
her peers who were encouraging her to do so.  She didn't really like it very much and it did
not have nearly the intensity of her experience now.
        She considered the possibility that she was going crazy.  She heard about people
who suddenly go crazy and hear voices and do weird things like try to cut themselves up or
start shooting at people.  What she'd heard or read about crazy people is their experiences
were very negative, confusing, and depressing.  Somehow this did not feel like being crazy
because it felt very positive and illuminating and her mind felt very clear. 
        Indeed, her mind felt clearer than she'd ever remembered it feeling.  She had a
sense of being able to examine her mind in a very objective way.  The kinds of things that
usually mattered to her such as her status in life, her romances, her relationships with
friends, just didn't seem especially relevant to her now.  It seemed unreal.  Her mind
appeared to be nothing but a bunch of programs which she could reprogram if she thus
chose to.  Her body attached to her mind seemed to be some kind of automaton.
        Jody debated whether this is something she should tell people about or not.

        Jody had never been especially religious or spiritual prior to having this experience. 
She thought the New Age people with their channeling and silly chants were a bunch of
gullible mush-brains.  Conventional religion didn't do anything for her either; it all seemed
so dead and devoid of meaning.  She had been brought up in a rather agnostic Jewish
family who rarely went to their temple except for special occasions of the year and that was
really just a get-together of friends and relatives rather than a true religious ceremony. 
Jody made up her mind in college to become an atheist.  She couldn't see where religion
was doing much good to change the world.
        Her focus instead was in promoting social change and that gave her life a kind of
thematic meaning.  She was especially adamant about woman's rights, since she was a
woman herself, and seeing more equitable sharing of resources.  In her college years, she
was a mild leftist.  She believed in making social change from within the system rather than
by violent overthrow of the government, which she shied away from.  She become
involved in promoting the right political candidates, which turned out to be a disappointing
experience for her as she and her friends discovered how corrupt the whole political system
really was.
        Her other peers who were exploring their consciousness with drugs and meditation
seemed like escapists to her.  Since they were not part of the solution, they were part of the
problem.  She did not want to have anything to do with that stuff.
        As her post-college life turned out, it was largely one disillusionment after another. 
The leftist movement lost its original energy and she saw so many of her peers become
gradually transformed into the very same people they once rebelled against.  One
particularly horrifying incident was when one good friend of hers who was once a leader of
S.D.S. and promoted environmental causes became a top manager in the MacDonald's
Corporation that blatantly destroyed the environment by cutting down trees in Brazil to
make way for pastures for cheap beef so the Americans could have their hamburgers.  "I
realized that it was time for me to grow up and make money to support my family," was
his justification for this.
        She was determined not to sell out like that.  However, the best she finally could do
was find a social work job assisting battered women in defining new lives for themselves. 
It was not an easy job - she often had to see women (and their children!) who had been
badly beat up by nasty drunken husbands, then find shelters for them.  Husbands came
around trying to find out where they had gone.  The most painful aspect of it was when
some of these women would go right back to these husbands to renew a horribly
dysfunctional relationship.  She could not figure out what had gotten into them to do this. 
The pay was not as good as more capitalistic work, the funding was low (and they were
often threatened by losing it by higher government agencies who didn't care), but at least it
was somewhat meaningful work to her.
        On the side, she wound up in a series of different relationships which were always
quite intense and violent at the same time.  The intensity of the relationships gave her life
some substance.  She was married and divorced three times.  She had a couple of lesbian
relationships.  Jody was addicted to relationships.  She would get caught up in them and
then mysteriously she would feel the need to drive the person away.  She often wished she
could simply be satisfied to be alone and self-sufficient, but there was something about
being alone which frightened her and made her want to rush back into another relationship. 
These were not all necessarily sexual; they included friendships, too.
        She did not meditate.  She did not get up and run around the block.  She was not a
vegetarian, though she tended to avoid red meat.  She was a social drinker and occasionally
indulged in a toke or two of pot.  She did not live any special lifestyle.
        In light of all this, Jody couldn't figure out why she was having these spiritual
experiences all of a sudden.  Could it be that her life lacked a certain meaning and these
experiences were a kind of "rebound effect"?  Jody was wondering if there was some
validity to what these different religions and mystical paths pointed to.

        Jody proceeded to do some research about religious and mystical experiences.  She
went to the local town library.  There was not a whole lot there - just a paltry row of books
relating to religion in general.  One of the first texts she stumbled across was William
James' "Varieties of Religious Experiences".  She was impressed how all these ordinary
people just like her would suddenly have spontaneous and mind-altering mystical
experiences.  They sounded a lot like what happened to her.
        She then became curious about Eastern mysticism.  She got a book called "The
Upanishads" and another one called "The Bhagavad Gita".  There were certain phrases that
rang a bell with her in comparism with her own experience.  From the Bhagavad Gita:

                "If the light of a thousand suns
                 were to blaze in the sky at once,
                 such would hardly match the splendor 
                 of that Great Being".


        From the Upanishads:

                "The first born was the Creative Will,
                 The primordial seed of the mind.
                 The sages, searching for the truth within their own hearts,
                 Realized the eternal bond between the seen and the unseen.

                 This bond was an endless line stretched across the heavens.
                 What was above?
                 What was below?
                 Primal seeds were sprouting, mighty forces moving,
                 Pulsation below, pure energy above."

        Some of the paradoxical language was a bit confusing to her, phrases that went
something like:  "it is neither lightness nor darkness; it is both lightness and darkness; it is
that which is the root of lightness and darkness".  This seemed quite illogical to her critical
academic faculties.  Yet the reference to energy seemed like her experience; she had a
sense of intense energy contained with a microcosm.  Somehow, logically, this does not
necessarily contradict the latest findings of physics that has demonstrated that an atomic
explosion can be generated from a few pounds of uranium.  And didn't old Einstein make
the statement that energy is essentially equivalent to matter?  Perhaps what had happened
to her was she somehow experienced this rather than just conceptualizing it in an academic
way.
        The more she looked into this, the more she realized that all the religions were
basically pointing to a very similar truth.  There are even statements that Jesus made that
indicated this, such as:  "The Kingdom of Heaven is within you."  There is a basic sense
that there is a unity between everything and God.
        The more she pursued this, the more intrigued she became.  She started asking
herself how such experiences could be achieved at will; she didn't want to be simply a
passive spectator of it when the experience got the whim to take her on.  Of course, she
knew that this was one reason many people took L.S.D. for an instant mystical experience. 
That didn't feel right to Jody; she was a responsible hard-working member of society
working for a good cause and she didn't want to blow her mind (as she saw so many of her
peers do many years ago).  Since there were references to meditation in the Eastern texts,
she decided to give it a try.  That seemed like a safer way to go about it.  She got a book on
meditation by Lawrence LeShan that seemed to explain it well to a layperson and went
home with it.
        The experience Jody had was so amazing and blissful, she wanted more of it.

        Jody buckled down to it.  She sat cross-legged with a straight spine as the book
instructed.  She attempted to relax the fine muscles of her body and put aside the usual
daily concerns.  She had a little trouble trying to forget about the woman with five babies
who had been beat up so bad she was in a hospital and she had no one to pay the bills.  Or
she'd keep thinking about there was a discrepancy on her phone bill; she was billed for
some calls to Omaha and she would have no particular reason to call up Omaha, she didn't
know anyone there or have any business with anyone there.  Was she sure?  Maybe she
called Omaha and she just didn't know where the number was.  Did she call any wrong
numbers?
        Suddenly she looked at her clock and realized fifteen minutes had gone by and here
she was thinking about whether she made a call to Omaha or not.  What a trifle!  "Stop!"
she screamed at her wandering mind.  But wait!  The book said you weren't supposed to
repress any thoughts that came up; when you became aware that your mind had wandered,
you come back to your focal point of meditation.
        But the thing is, she didn't really have any focal point yet.  The meditation book
suggested all kinds of things:  you could focus on your breath, a mantra, a visual image,
really just about anything, as long as you focused on it.  Snidely, she considered focusing
on Omaha, since she was already so much into it.  Or she could think about sex.
        Yeah, sex would be a nice thing to think about.  She imagined having a lover slowly
stroking the inner walls of her vagina.  He said sweet names to her and assured her he
loved her above and beyond anyone else.  He gets down on his knees and gently licks her
clitoris just the way she likes it, fingering her both in front and behind while he does it.  He
takes his time doing it, not in a big rush to get into the main action like so many men are. 
Then he takes his pulsating penis and puts it in her mouth and she gets to lick it like a big
ice cream cone.  She then guides it slowly into her, sighing in deep pleasure as he spends
all afternoon fucking her, never running out of energy. 
        Jody suddenly realized that she was getting awfully wet between the legs. 
Somehow, she suspected this wasn't quite the proper way to meditate.  Although it was
making her feel good to focus on some earthly pleasure, it certainly wasn't doing anything
to alter her consciousness.  Jody scanned the repertory of meditation exercises she
remembered.
        Well, one was to chant Om.  Om is supposed to be pretty widely used, according to
the book.  It is supposed to signify the unity of the universe.  That sounded pretty good, so
Jody tried it out.  Rather than say it outloud (Jody didn't want to sound like a fool to her
neighbors) she sort of intoned it inside her head as she breathed out.  She would meditate
on the sound "A" on the inbreath, hold it on the sound "U", and release it on the "M". 
"Aum....  Aum.....  Aum......" she breathed over and over.
        At the same time, she decided to keep her eyes focused on a single leaf in a potted
plant she had in her apartment.  She did not allow her eyes to stray from that leaf. 
        The subsidiary thoughts in her head gradually began to lose power as the sound of
the Om grew louder.  There came to be an absolute silence in her mind.  The leaf she was
staring at began to appear to be the entire universe; it had that glow she experienced in her
original experience.  Everything in the whole room disappeared.  Her body felt lighter.
        Each Om felt like a current traveling up her spine.  The current made her higher
and higher.  Her body felt like it was composed of trillions of particles of scintillating light. 
She almost felt like she was floating.
        Jody wound up meditating on Om for five hours straight.  She'd originally intended
to meditate for only one hour, which is what the book prescribed for newcomers.

        Jody meditated as much as she possibly could.  She liked the experiences she got
from doing it.  She stopped going out with friends; that kind of thing ceased to interest her. 
She broke off a relationship with a male friend; she told him she needed to withdraw from
distractions.  She even meditated during her lunch hour foregoing food.  She meditated
during her breaks.  She would meditate as she drifted asleep and meditate as soon as she
got up.
        She felt compelled to change her lifestyle.  She gave up eating meat.  She couldn't
stand the heaviness of it in her stomach and she had images of the horror the animals went
through as they were being butchered.  She ate mainly beans and rice with some
vegetables.  She decided she didn't like drinking tea and coffee; it made her too jittery.  She
wasn't interested in sex at all; she could neither get into masturbation or going with
boyfriends, which all seemed to gross and distracting to her; she preferred to preserve those
energies to make her even higher when she was in a state of meditation.  Making money
was no longer of any importance to her; she came to the conclusion that money was
another ridiculous distraction.
        Everything became unreal to her.  Her job, the way people lived, the crazy things
people worried about seemed to be an illusion to her.  She began having trouble
distinguishing the desk before her from herself.  When she attempted to talk to her clients,
it felt like the same force that she was composed of was just talking back to herself.
        Because of this, she was no longer doing a very effective job because the concerns
of her clients were just a pointless movie to her.  Her employer took note of this and
suggested that she take a sabbatical from work and straighten herself out.

        Despite how deeply she had gone into this, Jody was a bit concerned about how all
this was affecting her.  The energies she was tapping into, although blissful, were
sometimes too much for her to handle.  How could she function in the world if she saw it
as a vast dream and thus could not take it seriously?  She felt so alone - sometimes she felt
like she was the only entity in the entire universe because the whole universe was the
essence of herself.
        It was time to get some help.  Jody made an appointment with a psychiatrist.  She
explained her problem:
        "It's like I'm IT and you're IT and everybody else is IT and everything in this room
is IT.  There's no separation between anybody and anything.  The whole thing is all IT.  Do
you know about IT?"
        The psychiatrist considered that she was in a lot of trouble.  He pretended to
sympathize but he had absolutely no idea what she was talking about.  His own
terminology was she was having "infantile difficulties, a craving to be back in the womb". 
Something must have happened to her in her early development to bring on this crisis.
        He suggested that she check into a hospital for awhile.  He assured her he would
straighten her out with the proper attendance.  He gave her some pills to take that would
hopefully make her feel better.  This was obviously one of the worst cases of schizophrenia
he had ever seen; this woman had lost all sense of ego whatsoever!  If he could cure her of
this, he would possibly get a promotion to becoming the head doctor of a well-renowned
institution he had his eyes on.  He would get wealthy clients.

        Jody continued to meditate while she was in the mental institution.  The medication
did not have any real effect on her except make her a little sleepy.  She sat cross-legged in
the community room and stared at a single point on the wall, having fun traveling into
tunnels of geometric patterns onwards into the vastness of infinity.  She read various
Eastern mystical writings, especially intrigued by the Upanishads and Taoist writings.  She
would smile to herself as she saw that they knew about IT, too.
        She could see that her fellow inmates did not share her perspective at all.  They
were more in a negative state having to do with feeling that some profound injustice had
been done to them by the world they were in.  Or their thoughts were very hyper so they
had no control over them.  To her, affairs of an egotistical nature were not very important
to her.  By her meditation practices she had gained control over her thought processes so
they were slowed down.  By her own definitions, the supposedly "normal" people were just
as insane as the inmates.
        Occasionally, she would bump into someone who appeared to touch base with
realms of the paranormal.  These people had certain abilities to perceive astral levels and
delved into the archetypal realms of the collective mind.  Their problem was they were
overwhelmed by it and did not know how to control it.  They were terrified by the states
they'd had inadvertently discovered and were usually incoherent in their descriptions of it. 
They also tended to have egotistical identifications with their states such as believing they
were the return to the Messiah or special agents of paranormal forces.
        Jody attempted to teach them what she'd discovered through meditation practices
asserting that it was a far better alternative to medication, but neither the staff nor the
inmates seemed especially interested in this.
        The staff people observing her lack of communication and her slowness of
reactivity wrote her off as "catatonic".  They just led her from place to place where she
needed to be as though she were a cow in a pen.
 
        One day, Jody came to the conclusion that it was utterly ridiculous for her to be
there.  She felt she had little in common with the inmates and the doctors had no idea what
they were doing.  She demanded to be released.
        The attendant observed her quizzically and said:  "I'm sorry, we cannot let you go
until the doctor has determined that you are ready to go."
        "I could care less about the doctor's opinion.  I am ready to go.  You are here to
treat me not to serve the arbitrary opinions of a doctor."
        She tried to leave, but the attendants wrestled with her and shot her up with
something that would make her unconscious.
        When she came to, she realized that basically she was in a kind of prison.  She
groggily went down to a payphone and called a lawyer.  The lawyer told her they had no
legal right to keep her there as long as she was doing no harm to herself or others. 
However, the bit about "harm to herself" was open to interpretation.  If she was not
functioning correctly and unable to work to support herself, that could be considered
"harm to herself".
        Jody decided that she was going to have to fake her way out of there.

        She began to smile at all the attendants and nurses, wishing them a good day. 
(While she did this, she looked into their souls and wished them enlightenment.)  She
attended all the workshops and participated fully.  (She considered this being in the world,
but not of it.)  She gave a workshop on the dynamics of abuse in society, which was very
popular with the women and even some men realized something from them.  (She
considered this right living.)  She attempted to give formal courses on meditation and a few
patients found it was possible to reduce their level of medication from doing these.
        Finally, upon reviewing her case, the group of doctors and attendants assigned to
her case had no choice:  She was free to go, but if she showed signs of regression, she may
need to come back for more treatment.

        After her release, Jody went through a process of readapting to living in the world. 
It was not easy to be in the world and to act as though everything in it mattered, when she
knew it had no reality whatsoever.  She managed to return to work part-time.  She
approached it as an act of compassion rather than a compulsive need to make money and
acquire material needs. 
        By living a life of extreme simplicity, she was able to make ends meet.  For
example, she sold her car and got around by bus or bicycle.  She ate only rice, beans, and
vegetables.  She took the drastic step of giving up her telephone; it was only a lot of
distraction anyway.  She never went out and she had no need for entertainment, because
she found infinite entertainment within her and in the beauties of the world around her, all
of which was absolutely free.
        Now that she was not repressed by medications, the experiences she had acquired a
greater intensity.  She would feel a constant energy inside her she didn't know what to do
with.  She saw auras around people and she could read their minds.  It was scary how
negative people's thoughts were; while they were smiling and pretending to be nice to
others they interacted with, they had thoughts of hate and malice and lust.  She wished she
could turn it all off, but she could not find the shut-off valve. 
        At the same time, she became aware of benign entities watching over the human
race; she realized these are what have been called "angels" in the past - or extraterrestrial
aliens in the present.  She could feel the human race on the verge of a tremendous
transition from adhering to material values to finding more spiritual values.  She was able
to see far into the past where there were societies that were both closer to earth and less
materialistic - she realized the gods and goddesses they worshipped were very real entities
that became scorned by the perverted monotheistic patriarchal religions of the West and
certain forms of Buddhism or Confucianism in the east.  Jody realized that these New Age
people were onto something, although they could not completely understand it.
        It affected Jody to the point where she would often wind up in tears for hours.  It
was so intense, she felt the temptation to end it all by suicide.  She was even tempted to
return to the mental institution, although she knew they would not understand her condition
or how to resolve it.
        Jody was both blissed out and scared shitless at the same time.
        She often wished she could just become a normal person again, wearing the sort of
blinders that would make her unaware of all these paranormal realms.  But as Tom Wolfe
once said:  "You can never go home again."  She knew that now that she had experienced
all this, she'd never be able to settle for normality.

        One day, out of curiosity, she was browsing at the local bulletin board in the town's
food cooperative where she got her rice, beans, and vegetables.  There were always
different things related to different New Age happenings such as channelers and astrologers
offering their services, people seeking to form cooperative households, meditation groups,
creative writing workshops, etc.  Out of this morass of advertisements, something caught
her eye:

                  "DO YOU HAVE EXPERIENCES OF A SPIRITUAL OR PARANORMAL
             NATURE THAT OVERWHELM YOU?  ARE YOU AFRAID TO TALK TO YOUR
             FRIENDS, COLLEAGUES, FAMILY ABOUT THEM?  YOU KNOW YOU'RE NOT
             CRAZY AND YOUR EXPERIENCES ARE REAL, SO YOU DON'T FEEL RIGHT
             ABOUT SEEING A THERAPIST.  MAYBE WE CAN HELP YOU.  CALL US."

                              SPIRITUAL EMERGENCY HOTLINE
                                        925-2323

                        

       Jody wrote down this number.  They certainly sounded right for her.  Her only
hesitation was this might be some kooky cult out looking for converts.  But she may as well
give it a try.

        "Hi, this is the Spiritual Emergency Hotline, how may I help you?"
        "Is this the kind of place to call if you're having strange visions or something?"
        "Visions, visitations from aliens, out-of-body experiences, mystical experiences, if
you got it, we handle it.  What's been happening with you?"
        "I really don't know where to begin.  It all started a while ago when I was walking
down the street and all the leaves on a tree gave off this unusual light.  Then I got into
meditation that I read from this book and tried it out.  Next thing you know I was in a
mental institution.  Now I'm out again, but it's happening to me again.  I just don't know
how to handle it!"  (Jody was on the verge of breaking down in tears.)
        "Whoa!  It sounds like you've been getting into some weird stuff!  Oh, by the way,
would you care to identify yourself?"
        Jody held the phone away and looked at it like it was a big insect that had just
crawled into her hand.  What if this was somebody connected with the mental authorities? 
"No, I don't think so, not now anyway."
        "That's all right.  It's okay if you want to remain anonymous.  Confidentiality is
what we guarantee."
        "Well, what are you for?  You're not some kind of cult, are you?  Are you out to
put me on some mailing list?"
        "I wouldn't worry about that.  We're not out to change you or convert you or
anything like that.  We're a strictly non-profit organization that has gotten together people
in the same situation as you're in.  We've all been there before, you see.  The people who
volunteer to do this have had the same kind of experiences you have and we want to help
you.  We know, for one thing, you can't trust the shrinks or the mental institutions."
        "That's for sure.  I got popped in and they were doping me up on all kinds of
medication I didn't really need and it sure didn't do me any good."
        "And that's what we're here for.  We're hoping people like you will get hold of us
before they start going to talk to unsympathetic authorities so it won't happen to them.  I
was in an institution for three years and labeled 'paranoid schizophrenic' because I was a
witness to alien spacecraft."
        "Gee, that's too bad.  I was only in for a few weeks before I managed to talk my
way out."
        "You were lucky.  As you probably know now, this society is not very supportive
of people who have had unusual experiences.  In other cultures and in other times, such
people might had been regarded as holy people or shamans rather than crazies."
        "Do you ever experience the whole universe as a single entity?  It's like here we are
and we think we're separate individuals and we're just pieces of the same unity all talking to
ourselves."
        "Hmmm, not personally.  But there have been people who have called here and
volunteer here who have had experiences like that."
        "I think I've found the right place.  Oh, it's so good to realize I'm not alone!  Can I
tell you more about what happened to me?"
        "Sure, I'm all here for you."
        Jody proceeded to tell him the whole story.

        After an hour of rehashing the stuff she had been through, she asked, "So what do
you suggest?  Is there anything I can do about it?  I don't want to be normal again, but I
don't want to keep getting overwhelmed by it all."
        "Well, ordinarily we don't like to give directive advice, but since you've asked for it,
I'll give you a synopsis of what I think is going on with you.  It's actually not that
uncommon.
        "First of all, you had a spontaneous mystical experience although it wasn't what you
were searching for.  Perhaps it's the result of something you did in a past lifetime, maybe
it's the Grace of God, I don't want to say definitely what it was, since we adhere to no
particular religious belief and are open to all points of view.  It enchanted you.  You sought
to find ways to repeat the experience.  In a sense, you became addicted to this particular
altered state of consciousness.
        "The problem was you attempted to do it all by yourself without the assistance of a
guide, teacher, or guru.  That's where you made your mistake.  It's understandable that this
would happen, since there's not really much support for this in this culture and you felt you
couldn't trust the cults, also understandable, since so many cults and religions are indeed
selling a kind of spiritual snake oil.  You got some basic text on meditation to give you the
basics, then you started making it up as you went along.  By happenstance, perhaps by
some extrasensory knowledge that you tapped into, whatever, you serendipitously hit upon
a method that got you mystically high.  But it's like the people who use L.S.D., you kicked
open the door to the other side rather than finding the proper key or combination to do it.
        "Now you got the door wide open and all kinds of paranormal information is
flooding your system and you don't know how to close it again."
        "Yeah, that sounds a lot like it.  So how do I find a guide?"
        "I'm afraid that's as much direction as I can give you.  You will have to do the rest
for yourself.  You'll have to experiment with going through as many teachers and systems
as you can until you hit upon one that feels right for you.  The most I can say is:  Use your
intuition.  You already have some paranormal powers so you can feel out who feels real
and who's just in it for the fame and fortune."
        "Do you people have any system for doing this?"
        "Not really.  We could send you a list of different paths and what their general
slants are.  But it sounds to me like you've already done a lot of that research for yourself."
        "Well, I'll try.  Hey, it's been really nice talking to you.  Can I give you a call
again?"
        "No problem.  My name's Bob if you want to speak to me in particular.  I'd like to
hear how it went with you."
        "I think I will.  My name is Jody; I feel okay about giving you my name now."
        "Take good care of yourself, Jody.  I hope you'll find your path."
        "Oh, I'm sure I will.  Thanks again."

        "Hello, may I speak to Bob?"
        "This is he.  Oh, hi Jody.  How'd it go with you?"
        "Well, I joined a group of meditators who use Kundalini Yoga.  There's this guy
who went to India to study it and he seems to know what he's doing."
        "Good!  I had a feeling that some kind of Eastern meditation technique is where
you would be leaning towards."
        "Yeah, I had to go through a number of different groups, but a lot of them felt kind
of fake to me and I eventually quit.  But this group seems to understand the dynamics of
controlling paranormal energies.  They seem to be a kind of hybrid - they also use Sufi
methods, the system of Gurdjieff, and Vissapana meditation.  They are a rather open-
minded group and they use what methods work for them rather than being dogmatic about
it.  I just couldn't get into the people that seem dogmatic."
        "You seem to be a rather individualistic person to me; you needed to find
something that you can fit in with you rather than you fitting in with it."
        "Now that I understand better what's going on with me, I seem to have more
control over it.  I'm able to work full-time again, for one thing."
        "That's great, Jody!"
        "Now I've started it all over again taking it in smaller increments, not rushing it.  I
guess I bit off more than I could chew back there."
        "That sounds like the right way for you to do it."
        "And I've been having some wonderful experiences.  Can I tell you about them?"
        "Sure.  That's what I'm here for."
        And Jody told him about all the experiences she'd been having with celestial entities
and finding her inner teacher who gave her further guidance.  And, the best thing about it,
she was able to use her experiences to improve the world and environment around her. 
She found an increase in creativity which she used to make her social organization work so
much better; she was promoted to being a higher-level manager because of this.  She also
organized seminars in methods she had learned.

        At last, Jody was able to function in the world, but was detached from its rewards
and punishments at the same time.  She had created the path that was right for her.  Step
by step, she climbed towards her goal.  She was going to be careful about not taking on
more than what she was ready for.  She did not regret the experiences she'd had - they
were a great catalyst for her to get started.  But she was going to make sure that whatever
she learned, she would pass on to those who seek the same thing.  Meanwhile, she would
pay heed to those beyond her and do it right this time.
        She also became a volunteer for the Spiritual Emergency Hotline.

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