At the young age of four, she began drawing articulate, complex pictures of other galaxies and star systems, through which she constantly tried to explain her own galactic voyages in other lifetimes. It became almost a fixation. As she grew older, these visions became more frequent, rather than fading away, and Jamie would recount vivid memories and quite elaborate descriptions of herself living in and being from another galaxy, which she always described as being “parallel” to the Milky Way.
So precise were the images and information her daughter brought through that Amanda was quite convinced they were sourced in some other dimension, in which Jamie was somehow consciously involved and to which she was still very clearly connected. She had plenty of reason to believe that her daughter’s encounters with the spirit world and her memory of other lifetimes were more than mere fantasies of childhood, and that they were actual perceptions of a parallel lifetime in some extraordinary simultaneous reality.
Her daughter appeared to walk in and between two worlds. Amanda dreamed of knowing that other world, too, but she didn’t have Jamie’s same gifts. Her visions of what lay beyond were mostly gleaned through her daughter’s precise descriptions, and an ongoing narrative of Jamie’s passage through a “space tunnel” into her womb.
She knew, without a doubt, that her baby was a soul that had reincarnated from a very distant world. Amanda believed in immortality, so it was not a far stretch for her to consider how very ancient a soul she was, nor how far she had come to live her life, this time around, as her beloved daughter.
As the years passed, the two of them, mother and child, held this magical secret private, far from the skeptical “doubting Thomases,” who could never have understood what perceptions are truly accessible to certain human beings—nor would they have been willing to even consider the possibilities. Then again, back in the sixties, the realms of the invisible were far less approachable than they are now, at a time when an undeniable global awakening is stirring people out of their convictions, and opening minds.
The Buddha baby was just a little ahead of her time.
Amanda was careful to protect her daughter, as best she could, allowing her all the space she needed to investigate her parallel worlds and interact with them, without the censorship of a society in denial, attempting to shut her down to those experiences.
Through all of it, Jamie remained a beautiful, sunny child, who seemed to glow almost all of the time. In fact, people often commented that she had an otherworldly quality about her. As she grew, so did her beauty, both inside and out. This was a person who definitely had some kind of guiding star over her—a light that grew only brighter with time. It was a lifetime of extraordinary gifts she had earned, her mother was certain, from the good she had done in many others: pure good karma.
She grew up in San Francisco, the place to be “different” in the seventies—her college years. People used to say that everything crazy—every new wave—began there and then spread to the rest of America, before splashing over the rest of the world. It was no wonder that Silicon Valley sprang up nearby; this was one of the most likely places in all of America, maybe the world, for innovation and change.
Yes, indeed. San Francisco was the perfect place for a walker between worlds like Jamie Hastings to grow up in. Her soul had chosen wisely before coming in, born to a visionary mother like Amanda, and situated in one of sunny California’s most beautiful landscapes.
Her gifts became more acute with the onset of her twenties, and they did not go unnoticed. In fact, Jamie’s uncanny accuracy as a medium paid for her college education, since the New Age phenomenon seemed to have exploded there—right in her own backyard. She eventually got hired on at the Stanford Psychic Institute, where she was involved in extensive testing and experiments in all things paranormal, and there she established herself as one of the leading psychic visionaries in the country. Without even planning for it, Jamie’s career and her life’s work revolved around that ability to connect with worlds beyond the veil, pulling images and information out of the ethers, and helping others see things they could not see—on levels many of them thought could not possibly exist.
After twenty years of working off and on at the Institute, and consulting privately—usually with people in distress—she went on to work with the Los Angeles Police Department. Over a five-year period, she solved numerous crimes, providing detectives with precise information that she picked up in visions—invisible details that were so accurate they would almost always lead the police straight to the criminal’s front door. After many years helping out the police and one too many gruesome murders, however, she grew tired of the work and had to leave. The violence weighed on her spirit, and the darkness of it all began to interfere with her personal life and her overall state of mind. When a television show was designed around her actual involvement as the Police Department’s psychic investigator, and she was able to see her clouded reflection in the portrayal made of her by the leading character, she realized it was time to move on.
As knowledge of her uncanny successes spread into the corporate world, people called upon Jamie to dowse for water and underground oil wells, and other commercial uses of her extraordinary gift. She traveled the world helping her clients locate the hidden, expose crime and corruption, and invoke the spirit realms for needed information—and she was good at it. In fact, she was the very best in her field.
It was that one day in New Zealand, however, that showed her what she had really come to do in this lifetime: her true purpose for being alive. Beyond a shadow of a doubt, the death of the whales and dolphins had helped her finally realize who she was, and what she had come to Earth to do.
She knew her mission would lead her back to them.
She knew she was an Emissary.
3
USOIL
By January 2012, USOIL stock had tumbled for the tenth week in a row, despite the chokehold the oil companies held over the economy, and the power they wielded over the global political scene. The constant downward slide was inexplicable. All the other oil giants were showing billion-dollar quarterly profits, but Houston’s own, USOIL, was apparently taking more gas than it was pumping, while draining the corporate tank through outrageous overspending and mismanagement. After year-end closing figures confirmed the tenth quarter of losses in a row, the CEO, Mat Anderson, had all but run out of time to pull a rabbit out of his corporate cowboy hat.
At sixty-four, he still carried himself like a Marine. He was in remarkable shape and was every bit as commanding now as he had been back in what he always referred to as “the glory days” of service. His suits had to be tailor-made to fit his muscular torso and trim waist, while his executives, a few of whom were twenty years his junior, were already folding over the belt line, from what Mat called the “soft” life. He was a man’s man: an expert on the golf course, a force to be dealt with in business, and a Texan through and through—and proud of it. He could drink any man under the table, ride faster and farther than anyone he knew, and outrun people half his age out on the track. Above all, he was an unrelenting businessman—always working deals with big money players. And when he wanted to be, he was quite the lady’s man as well: a regular J. R. Ewing.
You just didn’t want to cross him: man or woman, friend or foe.
Gray now, he still wore his hair shaved to less than a half inch; he ran five miles every morning; he worked out in the gym for hours each day—but suffered, despite all his physical prowess, from high blood pressure and an almost chronic state of acid reflux.
This day, the acid had climbed all the way up into his throat. Along with the official financials from headquarters had come orders for him to report to the top brass in New York the next morning: no prep time; no guidelines. Just show up. He knew that meant one of two things: either USOIL, one small, but important cog on a huge multinational wheel, was about to be sold … or the “powers that be” were bringing him in to negotiate what it would take to get him out.
In the ten years he had served as chief executive officer for the company, he consolidated a formidable network of power players like himself—people who had their own reasons to want him to hold his position at the top of the corporation. “Interested” people. At that level, the strings of corruption become so entangled and the people who dangle them so entwined in each other’s affairs that unraveling them—enough to extract one person from the web—becomes downright messy, if not impossible.
He knew who he had behind him, and he also knew all kinds of secrets and dirty deals that had to “stay in Vegas,” as he loved to say. If they wanted him to go quietly into the night, they were going to have to make the parting nice and sweet … way too sweet to refuse.
There were still three years left to his mandate, which he was sure were turnaround years for the company—and he knew what he had to do. And then, he had his people in high places, pulling on those strings. He needed just a little more time to get the job done, so that he could step out of the corporate world and into retirement a hero—or at the very least, a winner. He wasn’t about to go out in a trough, after a career of surfing the high waves.
That just was not his style.
He left for New York with these thoughts racing through his head, swinging like a pendulum … left to right and back again. He couldn’t seem to stop his mind from jumping back and forth, between the trepidation of being thrown into a pit of Wall Street vipers, and a certain self-assured complacency, knowing that he still had three years to reverse the spiral, before his mandate ran out.
It didn’t help the balance sheets that Mat had a consummate ability to spend the corporation’s money, even though he was, in his own right, a multimillionaire. His flamboyant spending was driving USOIL into debt about as fast as the White House was draining the wealth of the country: only the best for him and his overpaid executive staff; only the most sophisticated technology for exploration and refineries; only the classiest corporate work environment in Houston.
He flew by private jet and stayed in the most expensive hotels, even thought he hated them. They were cold and indifferent. No matter how upscale they were—nothing was like his own bed, in his sprawling eight-hundred-acre property outside Houston: Sundown Ranch. Every minute he could spend away from work, he spent there, shared with three hundred wild horses and a staff of ranch hands who took care of the business of running the place.
He loved that freedom, and the privacy of a world that made sense: a place to go home to, when the other side of real got too crazy for him.
Manhattan was just that kind of crazy to Mat. The noise was unbearable, the women were too aggressive, and life moved too damned fast. So many people, it was a blur in the streets—all the empty faces and too many bodies walking around every which way, like they were all on some giant urban conveyor belt, going everywhere and nowhere at the same time.
When push came to shove, Mat liked to think of himself as a southern gentleman, even though a lot of people thought of him more as a ruthless manipulator, and he could be both—depending on what the situation called for.
He loved those “down home” comforts, and the way people just generally behaved in the South, more than anywhere else he had ever been in the world. Things were far more civilized in Texas; people smiled at each other on the street corners—even strangers. New York? It made him feel like a mouse in a cement jungle, scurrying along the side of the road, trying to find his way out of the gutter and back to Central Park.
It was late, by the time he got into the city that night and checked into his hotel suite. He ordered room service and settled in, going over the profit/loss statement, and preparing a strategy for questions he might have to field in the meeting. Mat was determined to turn in early, to be prepared for the next morning, but he could not relax enough to fall asleep—it just refused to happen. He turned on the television, set to CNN. There was nothing new about the news—nothing but the same footage, repeating over and over again, and the inane, insignificant banter between a few pretend journalists that had little or nothing to do with the real story unfolding on the planet—the story he knew from the inside. He surfed all the channels, about to give up, when he landed in the middle of Katie Lee Live!—a popular late-night talk show.
It was a rerun of an earlier show entitled “Psychics and the World of Spirits,” featuring three self-proclaimed visionaries of note: one of whom was a woman named Jamie Hastings—a very beautiful, very intriguing woman who caught Mat’s eye and sparked his interest immediately. At the point when he came in on the program, Katie was asking her specifically about her work with the Los Angeles Police Department, which served, she told her audience, as the inspiration for one of the leading TV dramas of success. Jamie Hastings condensed into a few minutes an entire five-year story of her work for the LAPD, with fifty-three cases officially solved, through her contribution.
Katie was taken aback when she heard the figure. “Did you hear that, ladies and gentlemen? Fifty-three crimes solved—and that’s on the police record for you doubters out there—thanks to the psychic investigation of this one woman.” She addressed Jamie alone, ignoring the other two guests seated next to her. “How many years are we talking about here?”
“It was over a five-year span,” Jamie replied, matter-of-factly.
“Is that unbelievable?” Katie asked of her audience, and when the camera scanned the theater, they all were nodding, in amazement. “That works out to be ten violent crimes a year, solved thanks to this lady, right here,” she said to the camera. “I’d like to see how the skeptics can refute those statistics.” She paused, preparing for another commercial break. “When we return … we’ll be hearing about Jamie’s successful work—dowsing for water in the Down Under … stay with us,” said Katie, and then they cut to the commercial.
Mat couldn’t believe it. How was it he had never heard of this woman before then? He was impressed with how natural she was—it came right through the screen. No pretense. No drama. He got up quickly and poured himself a drink from the bar, while ten or more annoying commercials, smashed together into a three-minute pause, ran their course, and then he sat back down, transfixed by Jamie Hastings.
He was drawn in by Jamie’s good looks, her poise, and her unassuming personality, considering what she clearly had proven herself capable of doing with her incredible powers. He had always laughed off the idea that psychics were anything more than a bunch of con artists in turbans, playing people’s weaknesses, and selling flimflam to fools. Yet, here was this highly credible woman, with a list of undeniable successes and accomplishments, making him reexamine that prejudice. There wasn’t anything phony about her: she was solid as a rock, down to earth, and humble. She had nothing to prove—her successes preceded her. That was an irrefutable matter of record—a police record, at that.
He decided to verify it directly with LAPD, once he was through with the meeting. “Hell,” he thought, “if this is even half as true as it sounds, I may have just found my magic wand.”
When they returned, Katie engaged her in a discussion about dowsing, curious to know how in the world she had managed to locate an extensive underground river, flowing a half mile below the arid surface of a desert region on the western coast of Australia.
“When you are seeing,” Jamie replied, “… or shall I say ‘experiencing’ from a higher level of awareness than that which we achieve through our sensate experience, Katie, you’re tuning in your antennae to reach the vibrational frequency of the target. You reach resonance with it … and it appears on your mind’s screen. It’s not much different from the way a TV antenna pulls the image onto your TV screen.”
“Makes sense,” Katie said.
“Or, the opposite can hold true. A spirit or a conscious essence tunes in to you and it reaches you—and appears in the material realm. Sometimes I just get flashes, but others—as in the case of dowsing below the earth—involve focusing my mind’s eye on the desired frequency, and then attuning my body to it.”
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“Wow! How does it feel to attune to a flowing underground river?”
“Huge,” Jamie replied, unpretentiously.
Katie looked into her camera. “You getting that, people?”
“Once you learn how to use the gift of vision that way, it’s really that simple. You focus on the objective, tune in to its vibrational essence, and then you make the connection.”
“You find a river down deep in the earth—water that can change the lives of millions of people—and you call that simple?” Again, Katie looked into the camera, playing her audience, stirring excitement.
“Well, I suppose ‘simple’ is not the right word. Let’s say it is ‘doable,’ ” Jamie replied.
“And you are certainly walking proof of that. Jamie Hastings, ladies and gentleman, and our guests, Miranda Symons and Robert Holloway: Psychics and the World of Spirits.” The audience applauded and Mat watched for as long as the credits ran, studying Jamie Hastings, a most intriguing personality, until the commercials came back on, and the show was officially over. Then, he switched off the TV and lay back in bed, promising himself that when he got back to Houston he would find a way to meet her—as soon as possible.
The very last thought in his mind, before he finally closed his eyes and fell asleep, was, “If this woman can find water underground, what’s to say she can’t find what we’re lookin’ for, at the bottom of the ocean?”
The Emissary Page 3
