Some years into my time at Centrepoint, my friend Yvonne asked me to go with her to a lecture on spiritual healing. It was being given by Colin Lambert, the well-known healer and writer from Waihi. Yvonne had cancer and, according to Colin, cancer is a disease that is very easy for beginners to pick up in a person’s aura. She had volunteered to help Colin, but she was a little nervous.
Colin spoke about what he did, then we were asked, one at a time, to come up to the table Yvonne was lying on. Colin would locate by feel – he couldn’t see it – what he called "dross" in Yvonne’s aura, and asked us, each in turn, to place our hands around it and see whether we could gain some experience of it.
At first I saw and felt nothing, and then, as my hands came together, a see-through black sphere appeared in my hands, about the size of a basketball, and the colour of a dirty diesel exhaust. "Well, I know what that is. That's a bloody hallucination," I muttered to myself.
I seized the opportunity to carry the sphere to a corner which others had used to deposit "dross", drop it and return to my seat. Part way along the front row, a lady reached out and touched my arm as I went past. "Excuse me," she whispered, conspiratorially, "but did you happen to see that ball of black light that formed in your hands while you were working?"
A bridge had been built for me between the "real" world where things looked the same to everybody, and the world of "hallucinations". Not everybody saw that ball, but I wasn’t the only one that saw it. I began to pay close attention.
For somebody whose emergent psychic abilities have no parallel or precedent in their own experience or their family’s, seeing things like that black ball can be something of a worry, better dismissed or forgotten about.
Unless and until somebody takes them by surprise, and says, "Excuse me…."
