by Philip Smith
A short time later, the spirits announced that the time had finally arrived—there would be a holy marriage of these two exalted souls whose aim was to heal the planet of human misery. It was all arranged. The stars were in alignment; it would be on an auspicious day that would ensure great happiness for the two divinities.
To get the happy couple off on the right foot, Arthur offered to do the house hunting from above. That would be his wedding present: to find the perfect house where they could fulfill their ministry and heal the world. In one of his messages, Arthur gave my father the name and phone number of a real estate agent named Bob Dwyer, who, according to this message, had the perfect home just waiting for them.
As instructed, Pop called the real estate agent and described his dream house. It should be open to the tropical breezes, quiet, and surrounded by lush foliage. Like any true salesman, Mr. Dwyer immediately said, “I have just the house for you.” In this case, he did. The house was located off South Dixie Highway near the Miami Serpentarium, a tourist attraction where they milked cobras for their venom used to treat arthritis. My father and his love had found their new home. The contract was signed that day.
Everything was going according to plan; the only thing left was the wedding ceremony. While planning the event to be held at a local church with a sympathetic minister, my father found out unexpectedly that he and Ruth had already been married. According to a message from Arthur, Ruth and my father had met and married in the late 1800s when she was working at a newspaper in the Midwest.
The marriage in this lifetime was held at a small church in the pines with Reverend Ted Tiemeyer, author of the book Jesus Christ Super Psychic, presiding. Ladies dressed in blue gaped in disbelief that Lew Smith was getting married. After the ceremony, the witnesses—believers, assorted clairvoyants, and UFO abductees—shared stories of remarkable healings performed by my father. Ruth smoked and ate cake. I wished the happy couple well as they prepared for their honeymoon: a trip to the legendary Findhorn Garden in Scotland, where forty-pound cabbages grew to the size of houses, and tomatoes were the size of cars. These extraordinary vegetables occurred because the garden was tended by fairies and the wee people who reportedly sprinkled their fairy dust in the garden, and poof!—ten-foot cucumbers.
When they returned a couple weeks later, my father was silent about his trip to fairyland. His only response was, “It was cold.” When my father was troubled, he grew quiet and measured his words. Something was wrong, and I don’t think it was disappointment with the size of the vegetables.
About a week after they returned from giant love land, I dropped by the new house to see how they were settling in. The front door was unlocked. The entranceway to the house was a large screened-in patio with a pool. The living quarters were off to the right and the garage was to the left. I walked in and found my father in the garage. He was leaning over the washing machine, adding soap powder to a load of laundry. I had never seen my father operate a washing machine. I was surprised he even knew how.
Hanging from the ceiling over the machine was a strange molecular-looking structure about two feet in diameter that seemed to be modeled out of blue plastic sticks sprinkled with glitter. On one hand, it looked like a high school science project that never made it to the Westinghouse finals; on the other, it appeared to have intricate connections and strange atomic configurations that I had never seen before. You could sense that it was unlike any existing earthly molecule. As I approached the garage, the molecule was spinning slowly in the morning breeze.
“Hi. What’s that?” I asked, pointing to the giant blue molecule.
“Oh, that. That’s a force-field emanator. It emanates a force field of energy around the washing machine and repels all negative energy.”
“Does that, like, help with the laundry and get the clothes cleaner?”
Pop laughed. “No, it raises the vibration of the room and keeps out dark forces.”
“Sort of like one of those electric mosquito catchers people use on the patio.”
My father thought for a minute and responded, “I guess you could think of it that way.”
“But why in the laundry room? Why not in the house somewhere?”
“We need it here because Ruth was viciously attacked by a negative entity while she was doing the laundry. So I built this thought-form to protect us from this dangerous entity. I don’t want her near the washing machine, just in case it happens again.”
“So how was Ruth attacked?”
According to my father, they had just spent their first night in the house. The bed had not yet arrived; they slept on a mattress on the floor. The next morning, Ruth went into the garage to do the laundry. Suddenly, he heard Ruth screaming, “Get away! Get away from me! Help! Somebody help me! Please!”
He ran to the garage to see what was wrong. Ruth was thrashing about on the floor, yelling, “Help! Help! Stop! Aaaaahhhhh, I can’t breathe, you’re choking me!”
“Ruth, Ruth, what’s wrong?” My father looked at Ruth writhing and then looked around the garage. There was no one there but her.
“It must be a negative entity. I’ll be right back.” My father went into his study, grabbed his crucifix, and ran back to the garage. He reached out to touch Ruth, but she kicked him away. Then Ruth beat him with her fists as she struggled to fight off this invisible attacker. Finally extricating himself from her blows, Pop waved the cross over Ruth and started talking to the entity. “You must leave here. This is no place for you. You must go toward the light. Ruth, Ruth, hold on, I’m going to raise your vibrations. Stay with me, it is almost over.” Pop said his exorcism prayer: “I raise your vibrations to the divine and healing level and free you from any and all negative energies that inhabit your body. I send them back to the proper plane to free them from attachment.”
Within moments Ruth’s shrieking quickly died down. It was as if all the air had suddenly been let out of a balloon. She was out of breath. Panting like a dog in the noonday heat, she said, “Oh, Lew, thank you! It was horrible! It was inside of me. I felt as if I were being strangled; I couldn’t breathe. I think it wanted to kill me. I’ve never been so scared in all my life. What did it want? I was just putting the clothes in the washing machine, and this cold darkness came over me. I can’t quite explain it. It felt like there were a hundred snakes slithering all over me, choking me. I’ve never felt anything like this before. Oh my God, it was so…” With that, she began to sob uncontrollably.
My father comforted her and helped her up. They walked back to their pink bedroom, and she got into bed. “You should rest now,” he said. “You’ll be fine. I need to go speak with Chander Sen and find out what’s going on. Some negative thought-form must have found a new way to feed off your energy. I’ll need to purify the house and build an energy field so this does not happen again.”
In his study, Pop picked up his pendulum to diagnose the incident. Moving the pendulum over his finder chart, his intuition was confirmed: a dark entity had attempted to possess Ruth. He closed his eyes and said another exorcism prayer for his wife. At that moment, he felt Chander Sen attempting to contact him. He took out his pen and wrote the following: “The thought-form that inhabited your garage was created in negativity. It was brought in on a vibration of jealousy to harm the female who lived in this house. Since it cannot reason, any female who gets within its vibrational range will receive its negative rays. A negative thought-form alone will not dissipate except through prayer or exorcism. It has now been released and will no longer cause any harm. The energy of a thought-form should be sent to water for purification and to be used for the highest good.”
As I listened to my father tell me about this attack, I had no doubt that Ruth had been overcome by a negative entity. I had seen this type of possession many times and knew it was dangerous and very real. However, I thought to myself, “Ruth’s always recovering from something: psychic surgery, thought-form attacks. Her vibrations should be high enough so that these things don’t h
appen to her. This stuff doesn’t happen to my father because he is a spiritual being, but with Ruth…”
In an effort to really understand what was going on, I asked, “So Ruth’s not going to be doing the laundry anymore? Shouldn’t that emanator thing protect her?” I didn’t like the idea of Ruth sitting back and letting my father do everything for her. After all, Pop was in his early seventies, and Ruth was still a young chickee in her mid-thirties. She could certainly help out a little around the house.
“We’ll see. I’m sure everything will be fine and this won’t happen again, but right now she’s still traumatized and needs some time to recover.”
“So what are we going to do for lunch?” I asked.
“Let me see what Ruth wants to do.”
I knew that Ruth would just continue to lie in bed. There was nothing in it for her to join us for lunch. The most Ruth had done to reach out to me in the last year was to spontaneously give me a small canned ham that she didn’t want to eat in front of my father. Me? Canned ham? What was this woman thinking? Why did this staunch vegetarian who had just received cosmic consciousness happen to have a canned ham lying around? Did she find it in the street? What was the lovely thought behind this overwhelmingly generous gesture by Ruth? None that I could think of. My father and I ended up going out to lunch by ourselves.
Ruth worked hard at trying to isolate me from my father. When I was in town during holidays, she would either not be available when my father wanted the three of us to get together or make such demands on my father that he had no time to see me.
My mother was insistent that I return to school even though I felt it was a waste of time. I promised her that I could at least get a degree and then move to New York to pursue painting.
Once I returned to school, my father and I would talk maybe once every three months on the phone. I wrote frequent letters and received occasional replies. Our conversations and correspondence concerned mostly art or which of the many metaphysical books on color healing, magic, kundalini, or orgone theory I had read. Our connection remained our ongoing discussions of the supernatural. Possibly our emotional distance was due not only to the physical distance but also to the natural process of me growing up and being on my own. Or maybe Ruth monopolized all of my father’s emotions, and there was nothing left for me. On the surface, we were no longer so intimately involved in each other’s lives. I later learned that Pop’s distance was probably due to the difficulties he was experiencing with Ruth.
According to written psychic messages from my father’s various spirit guides, things were not going well for the couple. There were frequent disagreements, which were compounded by Ruth’s manipulative and erratic behavior. What was extremely odd about these particular messages were the repeated scoldings that my father would receive from the spirits. Yet they always excused Ruth’s violent outbursts as a normal reaction to my father’s uncaring coldness. Until Ruth appeared, the spirits had always been very gentle and protective of my father. If they chastised him, it was only for not working hard enough or seeing enough patients, but never for not being understanding. I came across these documents after my father’s death. In reading them, I realized that something strange had occurred in his relationship with his longtime spirit guides. I couldn’t quite understand it, but something had definitely changed.
The following message from Arthur was odd in both its tone and choice of words. It seemed curt and lacking in Arthur’s usual literacy:
“Your upsetment is a very strong reaction, knowing as you do that Ruth is hardly responsible for her outburst. It is about time that you were able to realize it. Ruth could absolutely not be capable in her right mind of doing the things she does when negative forces suggest the action. Please stop and think before you get angry, so that both of you don’t get upset. It won’t be much longer now when everything will be smoothed over. Hold on till then, and all will be well, and our problems will have been resolved.”
Upsetment? When he was alive, Arthur Ford was an extraordinarily articulate and erudite gentleman. I doubt that death erased any of his verbal skills. Increasingly, messages from Arthur and Chander Sen took on an aggressive and condescending character that I had never seen before.
On another occasion, Arthur castigated my father once again: “Lew, you are being stubborn again. It does not take much to irritate Ruth, so why invite trouble? You are both honed to a sharp edge; just ease back and don’t throw darts. Please believe me, I know what I am saying. Your friend, Arthur.” As a result of these spirit messages, my father began to question himself and started searching for various ways to become softer, gentler, and more loving toward Ruth. However, whatever he did was never enough. There was always another unexpected outburst from her that was quickly followed by a stern reprimand from his spirit guides.
Without telling me, my father and the divine Miss Ruth quietly divorced. Also without telling me, he then remarried Ruth three months later. Then, eight months later, the happy couple divorced again. This time Ruth sailed into the sunset with a boat captain she met and a chunk of alimony payments from my father. The first time Ruth married my father was for money. The second time Ruth married my father was for more money. Most of the money that he had carefully saved to continue his healing work and research departed with Ruth to fund her next psychotic adventure.
Ruth was an anomaly, a black hole, a blip in the quantum theory of space-time continuum. For whatever reason, the spirits conjured up this witch and put her directly in my father’s focus. I can only imagine that through Ruth he had experienced an entire life cycle of emotions—love, courtship, marriage, divorce, longing, marriage, divorce, and betrayal—in the space of less than twenty-four months. At this stage in my father’s life, time was precious. This was his last chance to live the life of an average mortal. He had work to do and not long to do it. Now that this compressed roller-coaster ride was over, it was time to get down to the serious business of making miracles in a way that had never been done before and no one could have ever imagined.
Throughout my adult life, Ruth’s relationship with my father remained one of those unsolved mysteries that happen to all of us. None of us can ever really know what generates or extinguishes that special spark between two people. We are all outsiders when it comes to other people’s relationships. For me this was one of the only incidents in my father’s life where I could not comprehend how both he and his spirit guides had allowed Ruth to enter his life and create the damage that she did. Once my initial dislike of her had subsided, I began to simply accept this aberration in my father as a curious flaw in an otherwise remarkable man.
After I finished the first draft of this book, I was reviewing some of my father’s papers, and I came across a stack of pages ripped out of a steno notebook. They had been stuffed in the back of a spiral notebook and were held together by a rusted paper clip that included a small piece of paper marked “Imposters.” I had no idea what this meant and began looking through the messages. Each page had a red line drawn through it as if it were to be deleted. These messages from the spirits detailed the psychic operation that Ruth had gone through, as well as messages about her depression and irrational behavior. Much of the material I was familiar with—the waiting, the pain, the promises of great psychic powers. As before, the messages seemed odd in their hostile tone as they provided questionable explanations for an array of puzzling events.
One message from Arthur was somewhat defensive, apparently in response to a question posed by my father. “Guardian angels are always sure of what will happen. Spirit doctors and guides are not. We have been working on Ruth all this time with a concept in mind that memory and knowledge can be implanted in the human entity and can be withdrawn at the will of that entity. This makes for an all-knowing human computer. What better means would there be for bringing the ‘word of God’ to all who will listen? This, my friend, is no hoax. Ruth has been subjected to that before, and you have a right to be wary, but she knows in her heart that she i
s being programmed for what she has been destined for. We are being supremely careful and cautious, for this has been our greatest undertaking to date. We too had to experiment and learn and develop skills and knowledge before we started with Ruth. Our beginning goes back many incarnations of the present Ruth with foreknowledge of what was to be. Her soul history or destiny has been as a leader. But leaders must be taught if they are to fulfill their missions. Chander Sen and Dr. Berman were the only ones who worked on Ruth. Be a bit more patient; we are almost through.” I was disturbed by the word hoax. Why would Arthur even raise that issue? My father had no reason to ever mistrust Arthur. I also wondered why the spirits would need to experiment on a human when they had access to unlimited knowledge both past and present. This was the first time that any of my father’s spirit guides had been stymied by limitation. These questions bothered me as much as his marriages to Ruth did.
Several pages later in this pile of documents, I finally found the explanation I had been looking for all these years. There was a message to my father that solved the mystery. It was unsigned; I’m not sure who it came from. “We have both been fooled—to be kept from helping others and developing ourselves. The messages have been false because I have been gullible. I took the messages as true simply because I did not question properly. I asked, ‘Do you come through Christ?’ This left the door open. Negative entities can say they come through Christ but not through Jesus. We both awoke in the morning with a vibration of fifty. We had been pulled down in the astral. Also, the dreams have been bad. Nothing of a spiritual nature. You have been tranquilized to keep you inactive. I doubt if spirit would do this unless absolutely necessary.”
A few pages later, there was a clarifying message from Arthur titled “Regarding the Hoax.” “There are groups of negative entities that, like the White Brotherhood, who work for good, band together to cause conflict and create confusion among those whose lights are bright. This is their method of preventing the spiritual minded from adding to their ranks. The traps are set for those who seek shortcuts. You must be wary of those by listening to your inner voice and learning how to discern the true from the false. These experiences are lessons that you must learn. The truth is within you. Your soul will guide you if you but listen to the voice within.”
