Travels by Michael Crichton
“I reserved the big bed for you,” she said, “even though you didn’t tell me you were so tall. Why didn’t you tell me you were tall?”
“I forgot,” I said. “But you’re supposed to know those things anyway.” Carolyn was a famous clairvoyant.
“You’re willing to trust that?” she said, and laughed.
I put my bags in my room, bounced on the bed, looked out the window. When I came back, there was a coyote standing right outside the living-room window. A beautiful creature, gray and white and tan.
“Oh, look at that,” I said, thinking: This is a sign. This is a fabulous sign.
“Yes,” Carolyn said. “The coyotes always come around this time of day. I feed ’em.”
I thought: Not a sign. Oh well.
I was introduced to the other people in the group. They were mostly in their thirties and forties, practical people: a businessman from Washington, a woman computer programmer from Georgetown, an electronics engineer from Los Angeles, a housewife from Oklahoma, another from Seattle. The oldest person was a seventy-three-year-old retired actress from San Francisco. She also had the most energy.
Carolyn’s house was comfortable, although there were no pictures on the walls. Carolyn said she saw so much around people, she was distracted by pictures.
Carolyn told us she had been a sensitive from birth. As a child she had seen auras, and had asked her sister about the beautiful, shimmering colored robes that surrounded all people. Her sister said she didn’t see any colors around people. Other members of her family didn’t see colors, either. When Carolyn drew pictures showing glowing auras around trees, her teacher at school said, “You can do better than that.” Gradually she realized she had an unusual perception that was not shared by other people.
Carolyn now had a doctorate in psychology and had worked in various programs at UCLA. She was also a self-described “techie” who took great pleasure in computers and electronic gadgets. There was nothing airy-fairy about her at all.
She was vague about what we would do during the conference. “But,” she said, “if there’s anything that anybody especially wants to do, let me know.”
I said, “I want to see auras.”
“I’ll bet you do,” she said, and laughed.
At six each morning a Zen monk came and meditated with us for an hour. Then we’d have breakfast, and there would be a morning session with Carolyn. After lunch most people hiked in the mountains or slept. Dinner at six, and then an evening session. It seemed similar to the way Brugh had organized his conference; indeed, Brugh and Carolyn were friends.
After the first evening session, she said, “Let’s go outside.” We went out onto her deck. It was about 10:00 p.m., and there was a full moon.
“Look at the mountains.”
We looked at the mile-high mountains behind the house.
“Do you see anything?”
I saw mountains.
“Anything else?”
“Like what?”
“Do you see any activity? Any lights?”
I looked. I saw desert mountains, bare rock in the moonlight.
“What do you see?” I asked.
She laughed. “Oh, there’s a lot going on. A lot of energy on the mountains.”
I continued looking. I couldn’t see anything more. Then, as I stared, I saw something that seemed like fireflies. Little pricks of white light. Very faint.
“I see little flashes of light.”
“What else?”
I didn’t see anything else.
“Any explosions? Beautiful explosions?” She had a sort of dreamy voice.
No. I didn’t see any explosions at all. I was looking at a damn mountain, for Pete’s sake. And I was getting suspicious. I didn’t want to be talked into anything. I said so.
“You just have to relax.”
I felt perfectly relaxed. I couldn’t relax any more.
I scanned back and forth across the mountain ridge. And then I saw a puff of orange, like a big burst of orange powder. I stopped scanning—it was gone.
“I saw a puff of orange.”
“Uh-huh. Anything else?”
“Was there a puff of orange?”
“That’s the energy. Anything else?”
I looked. I saw some streaky horizontal lines. White streaky things along the mountainside.
“Yes,” Carolyn said. “I call those snakes. Along the ridges?”
“Yes, along the ridges.”
She nodded. “I usually see three different things,” she explained. “I see pinpoints of white light, I see explosions, and I see what I call snakes.”
“You’re saying it’s really up there?” I asked.
“Aren’t you seeing it?”
“Well, it could be an optical illusion.”
“What sort of optical illusion could it be?” she said.
“I don’t know. Maybe low illumination from the moon, maybe something happens in the retina, you imagine you see these sparklers and things.”
“Well, come out some night when there isn’t a moon, and see if it’s still there.”
“You’re saying it’s there?”
“You’ll have to decide for yourself.”
Then she turned around and looked at the juniper bushes in her backyard. “Look at the bushes.”
I looked. They seemed to be glowing in the night. Around the edges, a blue-greenish glow. But in some places it was more intense.
“That’s the aura,” Carolyn said.
“Trees and plants have an aura?”
“Sure.”
“Well, what does it mean?” I said.
“I haven’t the faintest idea,” she said. “But it’s there.”
Carolyn was tentative in the hypotheses she formed, reluctant to create a structure that defined experiences and provided explanations. Since she ran conferences where people often had unusual experiences—experiences for which they’d want explanations—she was skilled at deflecting the questions back to the questioner.
Do crystals hold energy? She would say, “If you believe it, then it’s true for you.”
Is daily meditation a good thing? “If you believe it, then it’s true for you.”
Is there such a thing as witchcraft? “If you believe it, then it’s true for you.”
But she didn’t deflect everything. You had to observe her carefully to see how she modulated her answers. There was a subtle scale.
Did she believe that pyramids kept food from spoiling? “I don’t know. Some people do. Or did.”
Did she believe in astrology? “It’s fun to read in the newspapers.”
Did she believe in the Bermuda Triangle? “Well …”
Did she believe in vampires? “No, of course not,” with a laugh.
But in general she was cautious about saying what things meant. Someone asked her about the meaning of colors in auras. “I don’t know what the colors mean,” she said. “People have different ideas about the colors, but I don’t know. I think people see the colors differently, and see disease states differently.”
One night she turned down the lights in the room and got out a black cloth. She hung it over a door and asked one of the men to take off his shirt and stand against the cloth. She said, “What do you see?”
Immediately everybody in the group began to talk. “His aura is pink.”
“It’s pulsating.”
“Stronger on the left than the right.”
“He has a lot of energy in his hands.”
Carolyn nodded benignly, her students performing well. She looked at me. “What about you? What do you see?”
“Nothing,” I said. It was true: I saw nothing. And the more other people saw, the more I squinted and frowned and tried, the more hopeless I felt. It was frustrating to listen to the others.
“His heart chakra is very active.”
“There is a bright-red band around his waist.”
“He has little discharges from his knees.”
&
“Just relax,” Carolyn said. “You have to relax. You have to not care so much.”
I was beginning to not care. The whole thing was stupid. I didn’t want to see auras. It was a completely worthless thing anyway. Who cared about auras? What good was it? It was just a fantasy; these people were all having a fantasy and I was much the saner not to be sharing it.
I looked away, rubbed my eyes. I give up, I thought. I looked back.
I saw a man standing against a black cloth. There was a shimmering white cloud all around him, extending out about six inches from his body. I could see it best around the shoulders and head, but I could see it everywhere else, too. It was slowly expanding and contracting, as if he were breathing. But it wasn’t following his breath. It was keeping its own rhythm.
“Oh my God,” I said.
Carolyn laughed.
She put another man up. This second man looked completely different. He had a cloud around him, but his was pulsating rapidly, in and out, in and out. And this man had all sorts of electrical discharges on his skin. Big sparks were shooting off his forehead into space. He had a pink-red band around his neck. His hands glowed as if he had dipped them in phosphorus.
“I don’t believe it.”
“Believe it,” Carolyn said.
The other people were describing what they saw. “John has a much more rapid pulsation; his hands are very hot; he has a red ring around his neck and a lot of stuff shooting off his forehead.”
They were seeing what I was seeing.
I thought, This is fantastic! I can see auras!
And, abruptly, I couldn’t see anything any more. There was only John standing up there with his shirt off.
But now I was on to it, I had a sense of the feeling, the state you had to be in. I relaxed. I coaxed it back. I began to realize that it required a sort of inattention, the way you have to be if you are walking around with a full cup of coffee. If you stare at the coffee, you’ll spill it. If you completely ignore the coffee, you’ll spill it. You have to be mindful of the coffee and not worry about it, and then you can carry it anywhere. It was like that.
You had to be casual about it.
I saw the aura again. They put the first man, George, back up against the black. He was still pulsating slowly, much more slowly than John. I stared at his face. And as I stared, his face went gray, his features becoming invisible.
I asked Carolyn about this.
“Yes,” she said. “That’s because his aura exists in three dimensions. You are seeing the aura in front of the face, and it makes the features indistinct.”
This was obviously what I had been observing with Linda, when I meditated with her a few years earlier. Things began to make sense. We watched for a while longer, and then Carolyn turned up the lights.
I could see energy all around her. She was so powerful, it was easy to see her even in the brighter light. I saw great plumes of bright green streaking around her head. Wow! Fantastic!
But the minute I got excited, I couldn’t see it any more. I had to relax, and start all over.
I walked around all night seeing auras. I went out and looked at the mountain. It was active, sparks and snakes and orange puffy explosions. I looked at the trees. They were glowing. I went back inside. Everybody was glowing. It was fantastic. No wonder Carolyn didn’t have pictures on her walls. This energy was much more interesting.
By the next morning I had accepted my ability to see auras. I was done with that. What next? I was sure something wonderful would follow. I was on a roll. I spent the day hiking alone in the mountains. I anticipated a wonderful experience, something really illuminating and spectacular.
I saw a couple of rabbits. They hopped away.
That was it.
Carolyn assigned a meditative exercise. “Everybody in this group can love other people. I want you to go out and love yourself. Sit under a juniper tree in the desert and meditate and love yourself. If you can.”
I knew that, classically, this is a difficult meditation, but I was ready for it. I knew I could do it. Full of confidence, I went out into the desert, found a juniper bush, and sat down under it. I started to meditate. But I began to think perhaps there were ants or something in the sand. I shifted around. Also, maybe there were some snakes hanging around this juniper bush. Maybe I’d better check.
These thoughts disturbed my meditation. I couldn’t concentrate. Finally I decided this was the wrong bush, so I moved to another. That bush wasn’t the right one, either.
I walked deeper into the desert. I obviously needed solitude for this difficult meditation. I chose a bush, sat down beneath it, and relaxed. I saw another rabbit. It hopped away, but I knew the rabbit was still in the vicinity. Once I began to meditate, it would come hopping back and ruin my concentration. I decided to move again.
I chose a new bush. It was a little withered on one side. I sat down. Because it was withered, it didn’t provide shade from the sun. I felt too hot sitting here to meditate. I thought I should move to another place.
I thought, This is ridiculous. Stay here and get on with it.
So I stayed. I tried to meditate. I couldn’t do it. I had no concentration at all. Finally I gave up. I decided I would give myself love on another day.
We had two days of fasting and silence. During this time we were told not to look into anybody’s eyes, or acknowledge another person in any way.
This I found incredibly difficult. I couldn’t be in a room—say, the kitchen—with another person and not acknowledge his or her presence. I couldn’t pretend the person wasn’t there. I felt that was incredibly insulting.
The fasting wasn’t hard. The silence wasn’t hard. But the nonacknowledgment was brutal. Not only did I have difficulty doing it, but I also felt terribly hurt when other people did it to me. How could they ignore me this way? It was painful to be ignored.
I didn’t care what the rules were. I tried to catch people’s eyes, to nod and smile. But nobody else would look at me. I was miserable for the first day.
Finally I got used to it.
I liked most of the people in the conference, but a couple of them I couldn’t stand. They just rubbed me the wrong way. One woman was always morose, crying and sad. I couldn’t stand her being sad all the time, walking around with her Kleenex and sniffling everywhere she went. Why didn’t she pull herself together and get on with her life?
And one man was a complainer. A whiner. He had lots of complaints at the moment, and lots of past complaints from his earlier life. How he’d been mistreated. How they done him wrong. He was more than willing to tell you all about it. I couldn’t bear to listen to him bitch.
But by the second week I found my dislike for these people burdensome. I wanted to drop it. I went into the desert to consider why I was so annoyed by them. After all, all the others had their quirks, and I didn’t seem to mind. What was it in these two people?
They probably reminded me of aspects of myself that I didn’t like, but, try as I might, I couldn’t see how. I certainly wasn’t crying all the time. I certainly wasn’t a whiner. Was I?
On the other hand, in order to drop my dislike, I’d have to decide that moping and whining were okay, after all. I just couldn’t do that.
I fell into a critical mood. I began to notice things I disliked about this conference. For example, the use of jargon.
There is a specialized jargon for conferences. People don’t think about a problem, they sit with it. They don’t tell you something, they share. They don’t have problems, they have issues. They don’t help, they facilitate. They don’t have a way to do something, they have a process. They don’t have a lover, they have a significant other.
This jargon got on my nerves. As I sat with my issues concerning my significant other, I thought: I’d rather think about my love life. It’d be more to the point.
I started complaining to the group about all this jargon. I felt that a group of peo
Soon after that, I began to feel that everyone was indifferent to me, that I was uncared for in my life by them, and by everyone else. I felt sad for almost two days.
And then I found that I no longer had any resentment toward anybody in the conference. They were all fine. I liked everybody fine. Even the jargon was okay with me.
I was making progress in every way but one. I had been sleeping in the desert most nights since the conference began, and I was never able to overcome an unreasoning fear of wild animals.
A few years earlier, I had definitively concluded I was not afraid of animals. But at Carolyn’s, every night I curled up in my sleeping bag, the thoughts began.
First scorpions. I worried about scorpions. I hadn’t seen any scorpions in the desert, but I knew they were out there. Then rattlesnakes. What if a snake crawled into my bag? It was too cold for the snakes to be out yet, but that was all the more reason why a snake would crawl into my nice warm bag.
What would I do, exactly, if I had a snake in my bag? Where would it go? Would it curl up at the bottom of the bag, near my feet?
When I’d had enough rattlesnake fantasies, I’d hear the coyotes howl, and begin to worry about coyotes.
The coyotes will not bother me, I think.
Yeah? What do you imagine you look like, in this sleeping bag? A giant salami, that’s what you look like. A tasty sack of meat. Perfect for a coyote.
I don’t think the coyotes will bother me.
Yeah? They might. Especially if they’re rabid. You know rabid animals are unpredictable. They lose their fear of man. They’ll come right up to you. And just one bite …
I don’t think rabies is a problem here.
Yeah? If you got bitten, you’d have to have the shots; you know how you hate needles.
The shots are only shots.
They’ll still hurt. And, you know, the shots don’t always work. You could die anyway. And … what if you got bitten but didn’t notice?