SOULFULLY GAY
By Joe Perez
When it comes to all things psychic, I am both believer and skeptic. But You Knew That Already: What a Psychic Can Teach You About Life (Rodale, April 2005), a new memoir by openly gay 27-year-old clairvoyant Dougall Fraser, gives me many reasons for celebration as well as some reservations.
Mystics have experienced the fundamental unity of all things. In the subtle realms of existence, all distinctions between separate beings disappear. The awakening to interior spiritual awareness often coincides with paranormal intuitions about reality.
Researchers such as Susan Cook-Greuter of Harvard University have studied the ways that people develop their sense of self, and they have identified a highly advanced interior state in which authentic psychic phenomena frequently occurs.
Psychologist Cook-Greuter calls this mode of being the “unitive stage of ego development.” At this stage, peak spiritual experiences have become a habitual way of being and experiencing, and individuals have a high ability to concentrate on the goings on of their inner life.
At this stage of growth, psychic intuitions frequently manifest as a general sense of oneness with another person. For example, you may be in the presence of somebody feeling a strong emotion. You may then experience a profound unity between yourself and the other. You don’t just feel empathy, you actually are the other person.
Like many people who have attained a high stage of consciousness, Fraser frequently has genuine experiences of being one with others. He is also blessed with special gifts of being able to “read the energy” of others and gain startling insight into their past, present, and future.
Fraser didn’t navigate the territory of the numinous unity of existence by following the traditions of any particular religion. Instead, his psychic awakening happened spontaneously, when he was a teenager at summer camp.
He and five other 14-year-old boys were sitting on the ground at Camp Dudley in upstate New York. When one boy asked him an off-the-wall question (“What is religion?”) Fraser suddenly found himself witnessing a beam of light shooting down from the sky to the ground beside him.
He looked around, but the others continued to just look at him. They couldn’t see what he could. They didn’t see the beam that looked to him like God’s flashlight. He wondered if he was crazy.
That’s when a second beam, this one purple, flew down to surround him. He was now surrounded by nearly a dozen shades of white, purple, and blue streams of light.
“Then - whack! A blue light came out of the sky, hit me in the forehead and the chest, and filled my entire body with warmth. The spot on my forehead buzzed a little bit. I could feel everything, from the top of my head to the tips of my toes, all at once. My temperature spiked. I had never felt so intensely alive.” A moment later, his mind was filled with secret information about the boys in the circle.
“Your parents criticize you constantly, don’t they?” he asked one. “I can feel your father yelling at you. He wants you to become a pro golfer, not a musician. He bullies you.” He could literally feel the boy’s father’s rage inside his own body.
He quickly learned that part of the process of discernment means checking the interior information with exterior reality. The boys listened to his insights and sat back, slack-jawed, in disbelief. One by one, they confirmed the essential truth of the psychic illuminations.
In the years following the experience at Camp Dudley, Fraser has gradually become one of America’s youngest and most respected clairvoyants, a genuine rising star. He baffles those who scoff at psychics as carnival gypsies or along the lines of Whoopi Goldberg’s Oda Mae Brown character in “Ghost.”
He’s also become a thorn in the side of the charlatans such as the folks behind the Psychic Friends Network and Miss Cleo, because he’s seen their craft from the inside and isn’t afraid to undress the pretenders.
In “But You Knew That Already,” you can learn all about Fraser’s inner life, his experiences as a gay man in the psychic industry, and how he’s turned his unusual gift into a tool for helping others.
Fraser says that he gets his psychic intuitions – called “hits” – right about 80 percent of the time. But that claim isn’t verified. Readers are given the best hits, and virtually all of the misses are left on the cutting room floor. There are no control groups or independent scientific verifications, and we have no way of determining how many misses it took him before he got to the good stuff.
Fraser thinks that people who dismiss his abilities out of hand don’t understand it. “Everyone has psychic intuition. Everyone gets cues and clues from the universe. I am just more tuned in to them.”
Fraser even goes so far as to equate everyday intuitions such as a sense of danger while walking alone down a dark street with authentic psychic abilities. While such intuitions are analogous, they are definitely not the same thing.
People get gut feelings that are conflicting, wrong, or dangerous all the time. Learning to develop psychic abilities must involve not only trusting our intuition, but learning to discern the difference between simple emotional states and more sophisticated intuitions that derive from a high spiritual consciousness of oneness. Disappointingly, Fraser’s book offers little help in this crucial area and what he does say is wrong.
Fraser is a wonder of a psychic and human being, and his memoir is a big reason for celebration in the gay community. Skeptics should read his book to open their eyes. Believers should read it with a skeptical eye.
Soulfully Gay is a bi-weekly column that explores spirituality and culture from a gay man’s perspective. Joe has studied religion at The Divinity School at The University of Chicago. Send feedback to joe@writingwolf.com or visit Joe’s Web site at joe-perez.com.
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