Sylvia Browne in the Gym

Another snowstorm and frigid air too cold for breathing sent my workout indoors. I avoid the gym whenever I can get my two miles of walking done outdoors, with the sounds of songbirds floating through the air in warm weather and the crisp, mysterious snapping of limbs and branches cutting through the quiet of winter. But on a day like this, with sidewalks obliterated by snowfall and snowy roads packed down slick, I have to pay my $6 and hit the treadmill. Resigned to the neighboring treadmill circulating at a whiney 7 miles an hour and my own belt humming underfoot at a modest three-and-a-half, I was settling in to imagining myself somewhere beyond this room of two dozen angular, legless treadmills, climbers, bikes, and weight machines, most of them sitting like dormant Wellsian mechanical aliens. To my delight, the Montel show came on and it was one of his Sylvia Browne days. She was a breath of fresh air penetrating this overheated stale fitness room. She talked with members of the audience, causing smiles and surprises with every conversation. As I watched, I wondered what it is about mediums, especially rich and famous ones like Sylvia Browne and John Edward, that drives skeptics nuts.

Why are debunkers and skeptics so vehement in opposing a belief in life after death? I think they must start from the same premise most holders of a belief about anything do--I want the rest of the world to see things my way. The problem is that most skeptics I know, including the ones in my family, claim to not care what anyone believes and yet their "nonchalance" boils up whenever they hear the words "psychic" or "spirit." They bespeak tolerance while railing against belief and seem to reserve their greatest hortatory efforts for the outcasts from Christendom--gullible Spiritualists and "New Agers" who "fasten on" to anything trendy, pagan, Aquarian, and in particular, focused on communication with spirits. Skeptics never seem to want to listen; they only want to talk. If you say something they can't argue against or explain, they change the subject or leave the room. My favorite challenge to the challengers in my life is "What is consciousness? What happens to it, whatever 'it' is? And electromagnetic energy: you say the energy we generate simply dies when we do. Then how come electromagnetic energy from non-human sources goes on and on? Why is it only human energy that dies?" None of the amateur scientists in my family can cite me a scientist who has demonstrated, replicated, or explained the nature of consciousness. Nor can they explain the disappearance of energy in their scheme of things. So they respond by walking away or uttering some dismissive statement: "I don't care 'cuz I'll be dead."

Another favorite technique of the skeptic is to reiterate old, reliable, apothegmatic copouts. "What about the work of Dr. Gary Schwartz?" I ask, citing his work with mediums in controlled laboratory conditions that follow every piece of the time-honored scientific process. While he has not deciphered the riddles of consciousness, nor can prove the existence of spirits, he has to anyone's reasonable expectation proven that mediums have a significantly higher hit rate than non-mediums. For instance, non-mediums under controlled conditions may get lucky hits 20% of the time as opposed to the mediums' 75-90% success rate. The skeptics blame any work by mediums on "cold reading." Well, I explain, Dr. Schwartz has set up his experiments so that mediums and non-mediums have no contact whatsoever with the subjects: can't see them or hear them and don't know the subjects' ages, genders, or circumstances. At this point, instead of the "Gee, I don't know, but I'm a curious, thinking person, so I'll check into it" that you would expect, the response I actually get is "Well, I don't know, but I've never heard of him, and many more scientists than just one believe that we are just neural impulses and chemistry." Dust unto dust. Worm food. End of discussion.

Coupled with efforts to ignore or discredit mediums is an outright hostility against them. These rich mediums dupe people, I hear. They feed them pie-in-the-sky hope when there is absolutely no hope for life after death (which, of course, skeptics know because "scientists say so"). On top of that, mediums commit the worst sin of all--taking gullible people's money.

Well, OK, let's presume for a minute that the mediums are just frauds, preying on the hopes of the ignorant to aggrandize their own wealth and power. If that is so, then I want these all-knowing skeptics to really examine the life of such a person, the life of a fraud. What does it take to grow that kind of money? Well, first, you give up the comforts that come with anonymity and obscurity--the ability to eat out unmobbed, the freedom that comes with not carrying a papparazzi entourage, the right to owning a hand unfettered by an autographer's pen, the ability to have an answering machine that is most likely not spewing out death threats. Secondly, you give up time. Just take a look at the schedules of Sylvia Browne and John Edward; I'll bet they don't relax into their weekends like I do. Ah, the life of a celebrity--perhaps it has its rewards when you are adored by millions and suffer envy as the worst attack against you. Mediums, on the other hand, are reviled by a spectrum of people from professional doubters to closed-minded humanists to fundamentalist Christians. Sounds like a good time, doesn't it? How about a quick image to put it all in perspective: The Dalai Lama on the one hand, smiling and laughing in his simple clothes; the "frauds"--to carry the assumtion to its end--on the other, rolling in money and fame. Who is happier? I suspect, as many good-hearted skeptics do, that a Buddhist who expects little is happier than anyone in America who has gotten rich by taking advantage of people's spiritual needs. Wealth, power, and money afflict their own singular punishments. If the famous mediums are truly frauds, then they have exacted their own hidden sufferings upon their lives.

If, on the other hand, mediums are sincere and can truly bridge this world and the afterlife, then all the skeptics should revel in their message, which claims that the other side is powered by and filled with benevolence for all.

Either way, what is there to get so upset about?

"No Time Like the Present" (A Cliche Poem)

Another day is gone.
There are things I have left undone--
deeds I may do tomorrow,
tasks that were old yesterday.

If I knew I would die next week,
how would I spend my time?
Lounge like a captured beast in the zoo?
Watch syndication fly by on the tube?
Quit my job for last decadent days,
lunching at length on company time?
I might choose to live some benevolent dream,
philanthropizing last efforts and cash--
or punch out the heart of a foe/Anger!
Is that what I want to take with me though?

It would be awfully hard to decide
at such a dramatic juncture as this.
But not given that fate, we procrastinate,
the waiting itself a choice.
How do we learn to delay?

Perhaps it comes from within our birth,
collective superstition:
if we leave at least one thing undone,
we will come back tomorrow to carry on.

White On White, Flake On Flake

In the aftermath of the storms, the world looks extraordinary. Crags, tundras, plateaus emerge out of the landscape. Windblown avalanches halt themselves on eaves, then fold and curl under like thatching on an old English cottage. Transparent icicles bundle themselves in snowy jackets. Snow on snow, white on white gives form to the shapeless, chaotic, and random. The spray of weeds that had been denuded roiling stalks in the fall gathers snow over it like a blanket, forming a long, white huddle. Accumulated flakes draw white lines upon the hidden, calling out the arcane into the effulgence of a new and pristine land. Flake on flake, white on white fills the interstices, limning the familiar, the overlooked. The five-by-eight firewood wall becomes a filigreed wall of logs.

Similarly, the snowstorm refigures our human circumstances. A white van delays my left turn toward home and the end of another aggravating workday. It is an impediment--until a platform of snow atop the van cascades over the roof during the right turn, and an avalanche now blocks the driver's view. I watch the van inch to the side of the road, retaining its wall of snow on the windshield and hood. The car stops, the door opens, and a tiny, white-haired lady crawls out of the car. Navigating my left turn, I watch the driver--suddenly a vulnerable old woman--pluck snow off her hood with her bare hands. I pull up in front of her, grab my snowbrush, and clamber out of my car. We work together--the elderly woman with my brush and me with my gloved hands--to clear away the view-wrecking floes. She thanks me and we part ways--two human beings challenged by the same storm, the same impediment to easy traveling.

A certain kabbalistic wisdom asserts that all things come from the Creator. Bad events and circumstances and people, in a certain way of perceiving, are good. As I chew over that mystery, I automatically categorize and rank order the usual phenomena of good and evil. Snow--hazardous and treacherous, yet awe-some and beautiful, so perhaps a mixed blessing, clearly of some value--and therefore, good. Psychopathic serial killers--the embodiment of evil, clearly bad--way over on the baddest end of the bad scale. So how to make sense of kabbalistic wisdom regarding the goodness of things? All things emanate from the Creator, so none of it can be truly bad.

Maybe we need to look at "the big picture." Right off the bat, we can glean much spiritual good from snow. Indeed, even the hazards it generates can inspire good, forcing us to see each other, to check on each other, to remember that we care about each other. As a bonus, snow forces us to scrutinize the natural world, placing ourselves amid the power and beauty of nature as well as the destructive force to which we owe respect and the artistry of the blizzard splashing form and pattern, in which we revel, against the hidden and obscure surfaces, and we choose whether to balance or to topple off into oblivion. As for the psychopath--maybe the evil done by evil people washes out in the timelessness of life beyond this time-ordered existence, this living, breathing, and dying chronometer of a discrete life, a single lifetime. Maybe the forces of good we are empowered to create buffer the evil, and if enough goodwill is generated, if we recognize each other in this seemingly uniform mass of logs, perhaps we can obliterate evil entirely.

It all boils down to perception. White on white, flake on flake, snow on snow. Ironically, the monochromicity of a landscape seized by the fury of a blizzard is the brush that paints beauty into a sordid world.