Eons ago, when I was a little kid bent on experimenting with matches on a hot, tinder-dry day in England, I accidentally set the neighbors’ wooden fence on fire. It blazed as if the air force had bombed it with napalm. My mother bawled me out. “There are two angels and they’re writing this in the Book of Life.” I didn’t believe her.
Years later while I was working in the Middle East, a kindly old Franciscan monk in Jerusalem, Father Roc explained that the Book of Life was to be found in Revelations, Chapter 20, Verse 13. Being a skeptical journalist, it still didn’t make sense. I argued it was mythical.
Years later, I discovered I had a metaphysical faculty called Psychometry: It turned out to be the Book of Life.
The name Psychometry stems from the Greek. “Psyche” meaning Soul and Metros meaning Measure. It’s where we get the “metric” system. Literally, psychometry means a “measure of the soul,” but in psychic phenomena it’s called “Soul Sensing.” Personally, I prefer the name “Time Machine.”
Dr. Joseph R. Buchanan coined the word in the 1840s when he discovered that some people could correctly identify specific minerals and herbs, even though the objects were sealed in envelopes. Subsequent experiments revealed that when a sensitive holds a letter written by a complete stranger, the sensitive can accurately describe the letter writer. More! When Buchanan tore off a strip of the letter, with no writing, the sensitive or psychometrist would repeat the description.
HOW DOES IT WORK?
Two eminent parapsychologists made in-depth studies. German physician, Dr. Gustav Pagenstecher, and French physician Dr. Eugene Osty, whose escalation to fame came through his work with medium Rudi Schneider. Pagenstecher concluded that sensitives “tune into” or “link up” psychically with the object itself. This means the psychics are picking up, directly from the object, the events and people connected with it. Osty concluded that the object used in psychometry is only needed to get the sensitive started. Thereafter, he is able to continue on his own without using it. Both Osty and Pagenstecher were right.
My old teacher, Yogi Ramacharaka claimed that the entire universe was a bundle of pulsating energy--including you and me. No matter where you look you will find atoms and molecules, all bearing the same characteristics -- energy fields operating in their own time and space. Energy fields affect other energy fields--witness the sun and moon’s impact on the Earth’s oceans.
It is important to understand the power of human thought. Human thinking creates and radiates energy. It leaves a mark, an impact on other energy fields around it. Consider, two houses, both alike in outward appearances. Enter one house, and it feels cold and inhospitable. That’s because the dominant thoughts, the dominant energy of the people living there has been negative. Walk into the next house, and it seems positive, and the sun seems to shine from the walls. The dominant thoughts of the people living there, were positive.
Enter a police station--you sense the negative energy there. Enter a church, and you sense the peace and tranquility there. Dominant thoughts have prevailed and written a history which any student of psychometry can detect and read easily.
Where psychometry comes into its own is the fact it allows a sensitive, to explore the history of objects, simply by relaxing and making the mind receptive. Psychometry is the safest and simplest means of starting the study of psychic phenomena.
Take an object of jewelry, a watch, a ring, and you’ll receive glimpses from the owner’s life. If you’re a beginner, don’t psychometrize family heirlooms--they carry more history levels than the current owner will probably know.
To demonstrate the power of universal energy, or whatever drives psychometry, conduct the following experiment.
Have a person – we will call him or her a sitter -- pick a live flower from the garden -- even a dandelion will do, as long as it has not been touched before. Have the sitter hold it for a couple of minutes, then take it in your hands, close your eyes, and casually wait for some images to appear in your mind. The flower will carry parts of the sitter’s life story -- at least, that’s what it appears. Or was Dr. Osty right, when he said all you need is a “psychic crutch,” and the rest is clairvoyance. Who really knows?
It helps if the reader – the psychometrist – relaxes for a minute or two. Focusing on breathing with eyes closed is normally adequate.
Everything is open to the student of psychometry. Place your hands on an old tree, and the tree will tell you its life story--the year settlers came, periods of drought, the great forest fire. They’re all recorded in the tree’s energy field. Once you have dates, check out the accuracy in the local library or museum.
Some years ago I sat down with my hands touching a slab of sun-bleached rock, part of the massive Venetian walls of Nicosia on the Island of Cyprus in the Mediterranean. Images of British colonial days filtered by. Suddenly, I was in the middle of the Turkish invasion of Nicosia. The year - 1570! Turkish troops were everywhere. Canons thundered amid human screams. Cannonballs hissed by. I could not only “see” the fighting, I could “hear” the battle including the screams of the injured and dying. 20,000 died that day. Then the stench drifted in. The burning flesh of war. Nauseated, I switched it off. Here was a powerful combination of psychometry, clairvoyance, clairaudience and clairsentience. A time in history, the viewing, the hearing and the feeling. This was my time machine and it’s available for any student or practitioner of pschometry.
Some people question clairsentience, but it’s an essential, in fact it is a critical part of psychic phenomena and mediumship. Clairsentience is the feeling, the coloring, the joy and the pain, the emotions, that positively colors psychic phenomena. Think about it! Where would love be without feeling? Where would pain, disease and sickness be without feeling. Where would a work of art be without feeling, emotion, empowerment. Claisentience is the emotion, the feeling, behind psychic phenomena.
And like all emotions, clairsentience is difficult to describe, difficult to measure, difficult to repeat, hence it poses a stumbling block to the Spiritualist and Scientist.
How do you describe the taste of sugar to a man who cannot taste, or the smell of honeysuckle on a summer’s eve to a woman who has no sense of smell. And if you can taste sugar or smell the honeysuckle, how do you measure the emotion? How do you measure clairsentience scientifically? -- ah! There’s the rub!
Most psychometry images are not so vivid as my Venetian-Turkish encounter, but it is an excellent faculty for learning history, and should, I believe be taught in schools. Young people could learn from touching old artifacts, letters, photos, books, jewelry. Each piece carries a fascinating and enlightening story. There are treasures of knowledge all around us.
How far back do the records go? Much further than one would suspect. During a psychometry workshop in Vancouver, two people identified a shabby looking piece of bone the size of a fist. They said it belonged to a big animal, because they could “hear strange noises.” The third sensitive declared: “I’m getting an animal that’s very, very old. It’s a dinosaur in the Canadian prairies, perhaps Alberta.” He was right. a piece of dinosaur bone, 132 millions years old, discovered in Alberta. Then he added: “It’s eating small rocks.” Subsequent research showed dinosaurs swallowed rocks to assist their digestive system.
Psychometry can lead the developing psychic or medium into strange encounters. A lady brought me her mother’s ring. “Mom went over a year ago,” she said. “Your Mom suffered severely in her legs. In fact she was in a wheel chair,” I said as the first image came up. I felt the agony in my legs - clairsentience. Another voice popped into my mind.. “Yes, but now I’m free. All the pain was left in that old body.” Her Mom stood by her daughter and sent through pertinent messages for a long and satisfying time.” Psychometry is a great introduction to mediumship and survival.
When you think about it, you, me, the folks next door, the people at work, communities, towns, states and countries, even the planet, are all writing personal histories histories in universal energy. The interesting thing is that if your history is negative, you can change it, modify it through right action, right thinking. As the Modern Spiritualists affirm “the doorway to reformation is never closed.” Each one of us can change or improve our records, our histories in the Book of Life. Psychometry is the viewing mechanism, the process by which we can monitor our records written in the Universe. The Judgment Day of orthodoxy is not in some distant time at the ending of the Earth waiting to descend like an executioner’s ax. Judgment Day, the Book of Life, the Law of Cause and Effect, are here and now.
Psychometry, and all its brothers and sisters, is a gift of Infinite Intelligence, which allows us to view our records in the Book of Life. At the same time, we are presented with the opportunity for change on the pathway to higher learning and spiritual awareness. The wonders and wisdom of our Universe will never end.....
Oh, yes, Mom...and Father Roc... you were right. There is a Book of Life. You just had it in the wrong place. It’s here!
