by Philip Smith
A minute passed, and slowly Janet’s left leg seemed to be sliding back into her hips while her right leg remained stationary. The movement was slow and effortless. “I can’t believe this, my leg is just gliding into place,” she said. “I don’t feel any pulling or anything. This is amazing. Lew, if it wasn’t you doing this, I wouldn’t believe it. I’ve never seen anything like this in my life. This is impossible.”
Talking to the legs, Pop said, “Just a little bit more…almost…c’mon. Okay. Thank you. Look,” he said to Janet, “now they are perfectly even.” To prove this, he again placed his thumbs on her anklebones and used his knuckles as a measurement. They now lined up perfectly. “There,” he said. “Now you’ll walk more easily, no more backaches.
“I want to do one more thing before you leave. Please lean forward, just slightly. I want to do an overall healing starting at the top of your head and working all the way down your body. You should feel the energy going in through your head. First I need to normalize the lymphatic system.” His hands were resting about three inches beyond her shoulders.
“Okay, now I’m going to adjust your circulation system. We need to get your blood flowing a bit better. It’s somewhat stagnant; your pressure is not as strong as it should be.” He slowly moved his hands over the outline of her body without ever really touching her, as if he were smoothing bumps in the sand. She took several deep breaths, as if reaching for additional oxygen. When Pop pulled his hands away, her eyes opened. At first she didn’t speak but just sat there staring into space. The look on her face seemed to indicate that she didn’t quite remember where or who she was.
“I feel as if someone rebuilt my entire body while my eyes were closed,” she said. “All the pain in my back is gone. I’ve had that pain for years, and it was constant, twenty-four hours a day. No medication ever fully took away the pain. But now I feel brand new. This is amazing.”
“No, this is not amazing at all,” he said. “This is how healing works. It’s very straightforward.” Turning to the class, he added, “This is what I am teaching all of you. Each one of you will be able to do this and more. Janet, take a minute, catch your breath, and when you are ready, stand up. Now, let’s get back to the projectors.”
Janet waited for about two minutes, stood up with a smile, and walked toward the front door without saying a word. I opened it and let her out.
I observed my father as he taught. He was alert and sparkling with a clear, calm energy. Something had happened once Ruth left the stage. The klieg lights went on, and the director called, “Action!” Dress rehearsal was over. The cameras were rolling. Pop had punched—no, ripped—a hole in the widely accepted construct of the universe. He had found a different kind of electrical outlet to plug into.
One of the offshoots of creating the projectors was that my father had refined his ability to build energized thought-forms that could be utilized for almost any situation. With this new skill, he began to create a universe of invisible structures and functioning ethereal machines that served to protect him, energize him, nourish him, discourage intruders, and keep him safe from automobile accidents twenty-four hours a day. If you can imagine a comic-book mad scientist whose proton energy fields could repel asteroids and other invaders—that was my father. He had now entered the realm of science fiction and completely erased the boundary between imagination and reality. What he imagined became real, whether it was visible or not. Pop accepted, without any doubt, his ability to create a new reality at any given moment just through focused thought and energy manipulation. He switched seamlessly between the seen and the unseen without missing a beat. His world of the imagination was now completely activated, and he had forever erased any remaining mortal limitations.
His spirit guides were training him to utilize his energy for even larger projects. Now just curing leukemia or deafness was suddenly small potatoes. He had bigger fish to fry. I heard him tell one of his classes, “I have brought people back from the dead. I have had many cases where the soul is already out of the body. It was way down the tunnel to die. No matter what the doctors think or believe, it is the soul that determines whether the body shall live or die. On many occasions I have reasoned directly with the soul. But first I have always checked with the higher powers as to whether or not I am permitted to bring it back. If the soul still has work to do, I will ask it to please come back to its body and accept the responsibility of the work it has to do. They came back and were revived, much to the doctors’ amazement, even though they were clinically dead.” All in a day’s work for my father.
And if raising the dead wasn’t enough, he also told his students that with guidance from Chander Sen, he had resolved the dangerous hydrogen bubble that contained radiation at Three Mile Island. “I can stop the radiation from leaking out of nuclear plants. I did it for Three Mile Island. When that radioactive bubble of hydrogen occurred, they said it was going to create a meltdown and spill radiation all over the community. It was too dangerous for anyone to go into the nuclear plant. Fortunately Chander Sen came through and told me that radiation can be neutralized by using the violet ray. And that’s what I did. I surrounded Three Mile Island with the violet ray and was able to eliminate the radiation. After I did that, the bubble dissipated, the radiation cleared, and then workers could go in and clean the place up.”
When he wasn’t bringing people back from the dead or containing radiation spills, Pop continued to perform everyday healings, which often included assorted celebrities as they breezed through Miami. During one of my visits home, I took my father to the Miami Film Festival for the premiere of Brooke Shields’s new film Tilt. After the movie, we were invited to the opening night party at a Deco mansion on one of the private islands just off of Miami Beach. The teen actress was coming down with a cold—something she didn’t have time for, as she was about to open the film nationwide with numerous guest appearances. She looked unusually pale with a touch of green-gray. My father was introduced to Brooke as someone who could fix her cold. The two of them retreated to a corner of the room for about fifteen minutes, where my father performed his magic, and Brooke returned symptom free, ready to greet her public.
The projectors provided a new type of psychic technology that allowed my father to enlarge the scope of his powers. His correspondence school with the spirits was now training him to look beyond healing sick people and to treat larger phenomena, such as weather patterns, political events, and even whole societies. A new crew of spirit masters was now communicating with him from even more subtle dimensions.
One of the instruments in which they were training him was a series of complex geometric diagrams that looked a bit like Tibetan mandalas. The spirits would implant the finished design in his brain, which he would then dutifully copy onto individual index cards using a pen and a dime-store compass. Each diagram was created to emanate a highly specific force field. It could be used individually or in conjunction with other diagrams for a greater synergistic effect. On the back of the card was written an identifying code, such as “Phase II, #4 Hilarion.”
Apparently, the force of these diagrams was so powerful that my father used them only under spirit supervision. The spirits would contact my father with detailed instructions as to which specific numbered cards to place on his “sender board” at what time of day and for how long. Let’s say there was a hurricane brewing in the Atlantic, or the Everglades was low on water. My father might receive a message to place a certain sequence of four or five of these cards on his “sender board” for twelve hours and then replace them with other cards as the storm weakened or rain fell on the Everglades. In his notebooks there are detailed notations of these directions from the spirits.
In some ways the sender board operated a bit like the Buddhist stupas and prayer wheels that I would see many years later during a visit to Nepal. High in the Himalayas, the monks would string brightly colored prayer flags from a tall dome-shaped stupa, which to my mind functioned like a satellite dish for sending th
e prayers out into the universe. Surrounding the enormous stupa was a circle of brass prayer wheels, which you would touch and spin as you walked along the path. The spinning wheel would create a dynamic energy that would send your prayer out to the attention of the necessary gods or guardian spirits. Just like the monks in Nepal, my father was constantly beaming out silent corrective energy to protect and heal the planet.
If it seems as if my father was losing his grip on reality or that the constant impingement of spirits on his mind had created an advanced psychotic state, the truth was that he had never been more down-to-earth or shown a greater presence of mind. Everything seemed very simple for him. All he had to do was follow the instructions of the spirits. With his nose to the metaphysical grindstone, he no longer had to search for meaning, struggle for answers to large questions, or wonder if his powers would leave him. He simply did as he was “told.” And the results were, more often than not, miraculous.
Looking at these mysterious geometric drawings, I realized that the best way to really understand my father was to simply accept the fact that he was three hundred years ahead of the rest of us. This thought gave me great patience in dealing with his incomprehensible ideas and behavior. It was clear that I would never fully comprehend what my father actually did or how he did it. I now understood that it must have been a great effort for him to try to explain these advanced, ethereal thoughts that the spirits had implanted in his brain to plain mortals such as me. Therefore if he was willing to make the effort to try translating these supernatural ideas, I should be patient and nonjudgmental in meeting him halfway. It was evident that Pop had traveled to an unseen dimension, gathered information, and brought it back in order for us to hopefully advance our consciousness.
I had no doubt that one day in the future, many of his fantastic discoveries would become reality for a new race of more advanced, enlightened humans. And why not? All human achievements, from skyscrapers and heart transplants to sending a man to the moon, first emanated from our thoughts. Although, in my father’s case, his thoughts were actually coming from other dimensions. For reasons I will never comprehend, my father was chosen to bring this information forward.
sixteen
Mister Magic
Ever since I was a kid, my father had trained me to always remember my dreams. Next to my bed was a pad of paper, flashlight, and pen in order to record that evening’s dream sessions the moment I woke up.
For my father, dreams were not just the idle musings of a sleeping mind but another reality with its own logic. Back in 1925 he kept a detailed diary of his dreams. From one of his first entries, it is clear that Pop was already aware of the power of dreams to provide access to other realities. He writes, “I must train myself to remember my creations of sleep. I must put my conscious mind in touch with my subconscious. There is something in it. People awaken their unknown and latent qualities and powers in just such a way.” Perhaps my father was anticipating some of his future spirit guides with this: “Dreamed last night of a funny person, or rather a peculiar one of a dark green hue with feelers on his head and balls at the end of them which shone and glistened with lights and colors like a spotlight.” In another, he may be having his first out-of-body experience: “Dreamed I saw all the planets as planets close-up and not as stars.” But one dream stands out as the first indication of his nascent psychic abilities: “Dreamed of fire and freight train just before I awoke. First thing I saw after I woke was the morning newspaper with a picture of fire and freight train wreck on the front page.” Being able to dream of the next day’s headline in advance was quite a feat for such a young man. Clearly he had never forgotten this first experience of premonition, and it explained why he was so adamant that I preserve, treasure, and understand my dreams.
Pop would tell me that before going to bed, I should plan out my dreams as if they were storyboards for a movie. If I needed to solve a problem, I was to instruct myself while falling asleep that the solution would appear to me in a dream. If I didn’t like a dream’s outcome, he told me to go back to sleep and act as the director to re-create the dream to my liking. This was a psychological and spiritual training exercise. If you could sharpen your mental abilities to the point where you could direct your dreams like a computer game, you would easily achieve control over the events in your waking life as well.
This training had played an important role in the creation of my paintings. Before I started any painting, I would first go to sleep for an hour or so with the intention of dreaming. I’d wake up a little groggy, my head filled with remnants of surreal dreams, and immediately start to work. I felt as if I was painting while still in a sort of trance, and as a result, the hallucinatory images that poured forth on the canvas were more documentations of my subconscious mind than anything else. I could never work after I came home from a dinner party or even from the grocery store, as my mind was filled with the ephemera of real-time reality, which I found encumbering to the creative process. I needed the resonance of my own dreams to generate paintings.
It had been years since I’d had a bad dream. This particular dream didn’t panic me, it just bothered me. In the dream, I saw my seventy-seven-year-old father in a subway station at Broadway and Lafayette. As he climbed the stairs, he would pause to catch his breath. The entire dream ran just a few seconds, but it left me slightly rattled when I awoke. For some reason, I didn’t bother writing this one down and went about my day. The dream stayed with me the entire day, resulting in an uneasy feeling that wouldn’t go away. I hadn’t dreamed about my father in years.
Why should I worry? After all, my father was immortal. How could he not be? He healed the sick and raised the dead. He convinced souls not to leave their bodies, removed demons from possessed bodies, and neutralized nuclear radiation. He had superhuman powers not seen since the time of the alchemists. But all of this was just not enough to prevent the universe from skipping a beat.
“Something has happened…” Lisa, my father’s latest girlfriend, was on the phone. “I don’t know how to say this. Your father is dead.”
Silence. I had never had a phone call like this before and didn’t know how to understand what I was hearing. For an eternal moment, I completely disconnected from reality. During those few seconds, my mind went into “pause,” if not complete meltdown.
Somehow the cosmos had made a mistake. This wasn’t supposed to happen. When my mind and body finally resumed operation, I reverted to the exceedingly polite young man that my mother had raised, and with great warmth in my voice said, “Thank you so much for calling, I really appreciate it. Good night.” This was the default response for unknown situations.
Suddenly I was shivering. I had moved from the Bowery and was now living in a nearly abandoned turn-of-the-century brownstone that had been originally owned by the Astors during the 1870s but had mutated into a heroin den. The first night I moved in, I spent hours cleaning used needles out of the burners on the stove.
A few minutes later, the phone rang again. “Uh, hi, it’s Lisa.”
“Yes, Lisa.”
“Well, what are you going to do?”
“About what?”
“Well, uh, your father.”
I never knew anyone who had died before. My father had taught me that no one who surrounded himself with the white light ever died. That was the purifying magic cure-all.
“Well, doesn’t he just get buried?” I asked, assuming that some company just showed up and took care of this.
“Yeah, I guess so, but who—I mean, you need to come here.” She was becoming unraveled.
“Why?”
“Well, you have to take care of everything.”
“Like what?”
“Like burying him.”
“Bury him? I don’t know how to do that.”
“Well, I don’t know what to do either.”
“So, what do I do?”
“I don’t know, but you need to take care of this.”
“But I’ll have to
fly down to do this.”
“Yes.”
“Okay. Good-bye.”
After I hung up, I was overcome with rage. I started running around the house screaming at him, “You weren’t supposed to do this! You made a big mistake! This is really stupid! You better fix this right now!”
Breathless from screaming, I stopped and quickly tried to think if I knew of any technique to bring him back from the dead. I tried to remember everything he taught me but I had refused to learn. I knew he told me about how he would talk to the soul before it left the body, check its karmic record, and then reunite the soul with the body. I wasn’t sure where to begin. I didn’t know where I had put the pendulums he had given me. They were probably in a box in the basement. If it had been awhile since he died, it might be too late to get him back into his body. I didn’t really know what the expiration time frame was on this particular technique. If I waited too much longer, he would have left the physical plane and would have difficulty finding his way back. Immediately after physical death, there was a period of disorientation as the spirit adjusted to being free of the body. If there was no one there to meet it, then the soul supposedly floated around for a while until it got its bearings.
I started to call Lisa for the estimated time of death but hung up. I didn’t want to talk to her. God, if I could only remember what I saw him do hundreds of times.
For the first time ever, my father had goofed in a major way. For some reason, he wasn’t watching for just that one split second when the universe snuck up on him, opened wide, and swallowed him whole. In the blink of an eye, it was all over, and he was gone. Who would protect me? Who would stop the evil spirits from attacking me? Who would talk to Arthur for me? Who would make all the bad stuff magically go away? There was no one else who could do these things. It’s not like my father was a lawyer, and if he died I could call another attorney to represent me. He was irreplaceable. Suddenly my safety net had been ripped out from under me. For the first time in my life, I was now completely human and vulnerable. My gifted slide through life was over. I could feel the hard whoosh of life’s vagaries coming at me fast. I would now be exposed to disease, harm, toil, and trouble like every other human on the planet. My precious InvisaShield was gone. But most of all, I missed the man whose existence made me more special than I was. It was his exploration of other dimensions that allowed me to live in a world defined by magic and miracles.
