Psychics

I am fascinated by psychics. There are so many kinds of them: fortune tellers, people who communicate with the dead, people who can move objects, healers, people who become channels, intuitive people who can amaze you with what they know and leave you wondering how they got to know it.

There is something irresistible about a stranger who tells you things about yourself that he or she could not have had prior knowledge of. And how about someone who can predict the future with amazing accuracy?

I have met and heard of many so-called psychics, a lot of them fake. But there have been a few good ones with real abilities.

My mom met an Indian diplomat years ago who, from out of the blue, told her that he saw a big explosion in her life. That was a few years after my dad had died in a plane crash.

When my mom went into a coma for two and a half years before she died, a woman psychic whom we had never met sought my sister out because she had been dreaming of an elderly mestiza lady who had a message for us. The woman claimed to have the gift of communicating with the comatose and the dead. We brought her to my mother’s bedside and they had a “talk.” The messages my mom supposedly told her to tell us were spot on. She was the real thing.

When I was growing up, I heard family stories about a woman called Sion. She was a helper in our ancestral house in Bangued, Abra who, from all indications, was slow, dull and ignorant, until she got into some sort of trance. In Ilocano, this phenomenon is known as lugan, where a spirit suddenly takes over a person and uses him or her as a medium or channel.  When it happened to Sion, all of a sudden, she would be articulate, witty and intelligent, speaking in the same voice and manner as one who has recently died, or one of our ancestors. She would speak in an educated manner, even spouting Latin at times, as she engaged in long discourses with people in the house.

I found it amusing and amazing that my relatives who ran for public office in Abra would ask Sion what their chances were of winning the elections. And it was said that she would predict the results with uncanny accuracy! Sion lived a long life. In her later years, she became a fish vendor in the market until she died more than a decade ago.

Recently, I met a woman psychic here in Sydney who sought me out and found me through a common friend on Facebook.  She wrote to me claiming that she had dreamed of me three times in one week where she saw a vision of the two of us surrounded by the colors blue and gold. She saw this as a sign bearing psychic meanings. She felt I had something to tell her and she had something to tell me as well.

We arranged a meeting in the City. Lydia and I met Tintin at a shopping mall and proceeded to a Laksa place to eat lunch.

She told me about herself, how as an 11-year-old decades ago, officials of the Marcos regime would consult her about how events would unravel, and how she was able to predict most of them with great accuracy. Her relationship with them did not last long though, and soon she wanted nothing more to do with them.  She felt something was not right since she was being used for personal gain. She felt they wanted to “own” her. So her father hid her from them.

Tintin also narrated how she has defied medical science at least twice: the first was in a car accident in Manila where she felt her spine snap.  But she got out of the vehicle and walked to the emergency room. Doctors could not believe how she was able to walk unaided to the hospital, and withstand the excruciating pain.

The other time was here in Sydney where during a routine medical checkup, for no explicable reason, she asked her doctor to check her iron levels. When the results came, the doctor immediately sent her to the hospital and called on specialists. Her levels were unbelievably and impossibly high, past the toxic mark. It should have immediately killed her but she felt nothing at all.

After about two hours of talking over lunch, I learned that throughout her life, Tintin has been guided by some “forces from up there” that communicate with her and tell her what to say and do during important moments. She has learned to trust them and when they “take over,” she merely complies and says what must be said.

Among her officemates in Sydney, she is reputed to speak her mind fearlessly.  Her bosses listen to her because, despite her aggressive, often confrontational manner, she speaks with logic and  credibility. On a personal basis, she astonishes her bosses when she tells them intimate details about their lives.

Tintin said that she is physically, emotionally and psychologically spent. She often feels that the “forces” are playing games with her life. The weight of carrying the “gift” she has been given is at times too much to bear. Lydia and I noticed at times during the conversation that she exuded the aura of a tortured soul, one who is tired and weary. Sometimes, she wants nothing more than for the “forces” to stop and use someone else for their purposes. But she knows that the prospect of that happening is highly unlikely. So she was seeking me out to “help” her.

She describes the source of her powers as “forces of good” that are angelic in nature. Another psychic she met long ago told her that she was, in fact, a “general” of one of the powerful angels and that she has been thrown back into the world for a mission.  Tintin believes she has a mission to tell the world some important messages since she has seen reality from a rarefied, divine point of view.

But how to do it? She says she does not have the platform or the communicative skills needed to deliver the messages in a clear, palatable way. She had heard of my workshops and asked what she could learn from it to organize her message.

I asked her point blank if she was afraid people would see her as crazy. She said that many people already think she is crazy so that is not an issue.

We ended the afternoon by promising to meet again after a week.  

That night, Tintin wrote me a long e-mail where she asked if I could be her “validator.” I took that as someone who could help clarify and communicate her message, and keep her grounded.

I do not quite know what to think, or how to feel about this. She told me many more things that I would rather not talk about, and perhaps never will. Throughout our conversation, she was animated, highly intuitive and down-to-earth. It must have been because it was a Friday, a good day for psychics. Tuesdays and Fridays are supposedly their “power” days.

Tintin will be coming to our house next Tuesday for lunch and we will continue our conversation. By then it should be clear to both of us whether or not the dreams she had pointed her to the right person.