The inexplicable reality of truth

I had my first psychic reading. It did not go as expected.

Julia Christina

Feb 23, 2024

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“Do you know Louise Hay?”, the psychic blurted out.

She was hunched over, leaning into the camera. I traced her long, blond hair down her tilted head as she closed her eyes. “For some reason, I’m getting Louise Hay energy.”

I had hopped on our Zoom only minutes earlier. My heart rate was joyously elevated. We’d gone straight into channeling mode. No introductions, no warm-up. No context.

Earlier that morning, I was peaking into one journal from a pile I’d dug up from the garage the prior night. The first page read “Hyatt, Santiago Chile, March 6, 2017”. As I’d skimmed the entry, the memory had flooded back. I was laying by the hotel pool, resting up before my hiking expedition to Patagonia. I’d just begun reading one of my first-ever self-help books. Insights were pouring out of me and onto the paper. The book I was reading was You Can Heal Your Life by Louise Hay.

Now, Louise Hay is well-known (albeit deceased) in the realms of self-help and spirituality. The New York Times called her the Queen of the New Age. What are the odds, though, that my psychic brings her up randomly on the one day I thought of her in years? Despite walking into the session with a healthy dose of skepticism and minimal expectations, she’d won my trust.

After ten minutes, she interrupted her stream of consciousness to ask why I came to see her. I told her I was looking for guidance on how to fulfill my purpose. I felt pulled in many directions by competing priorities, unsure how and where to focus my energy.

In a firm, definitive tone, she told me that I was “ahead of myself”. “You have more time than you think”, she said. “There’s no rush. Your guides want you to take time to enjoy your life and your relationships. There is not just one thing you’re meant to do.”

Throughout our hour-long session, I shared less than ten sentences. And yet, her words resonated. They also happened to echo my boyfriend’s advice from my prior night’s existential midnight meltdown. How was a stranger able to articulate guidance that was nearly identical to that given by the person who knew me best?

If, a few years ago, you’d told me that I would pay someone for an offering called channeled soul reading, I would have rolled my eyes at you.

And yet, here we are. After listening to a dear friend rave about this psychic for years (“I’m telling you, she’s the real deal”), I’d reluctantly signed up. In energy school, I was increasingly learning about intuition in its most developed forms — clairvoyance, clairsentience, and clairaudience. All the clairs. There were, in fact, 18 different ways to intuit information through the senses, I’d learned.

My mind still wasn’t made up, though. Part of me was looking for confirmation that it was all a scam. The easy way out. The possibility that psychic abilities were real made me much more uncomfortable. It was time to gather some field data and investigate a question I was almost ready to stop asking myself: What is true?

The study of consciousness is both nascent and ancient

In some ways, we know nothing about how consciousness works. We don’t even understand how the brain works. Science, for all that it is, has not been able to explain the one thing that makes science possible to begin with.

Our gold-standard path to truth, the scientific method, meticulously removes all subjectivity and declares all that cannot be objectively observed unproven, speculative. Not even the paradox of the placebo effect warrants skepticism in our culture of skeptics.

Due to the lack of scientific understanding, the only valid approach to exploring consciousness remains personal investigation. This approach is based on a wealth of history, coming mainly from the ancient East. Yogis and monks have explored their consciousness for millennia, deriving what the spirit-starved West now devours religiously — Vedic philosophy and Buddhism.

These teachings have a nondual nature, they assume the existence of a single, underlying, unified field of reality, which consists of pure consciousness. Everything in existence and perceivable through human consciousness is derived from it. There are many ways to experience this underlying nature of reality: extensive meditation, a near-death experience, or a psychedelic journey with medicines such as 5-MeO-DMT (or the toad).

Once personally experienced, it becomes impossible to deny the existence of unity consciousness. Psychonauts will find that while externally gathered information results in knowledge, personal experience results in truth. Arriving at the same truths through different means may be all it takes to erode any lingering doubts.

With the existence of a unified field of consciousness containing all information established as truth, the question that remains is: Could certain humans possibly tap into this field without altering their consciousness?

How you define truth defines your truth

The Bwiti, the indigenous wisdom holders of the psychedelic master plant Iboga, have derived a worldview rooted in truth. They argue that there is an absolute truth, whether you believe in it or not. Truth, however, cannot be communicated but only experienced. Despite being absolute, truth is thus personal. This philosophy directly contradicts our conception of truth in the West, which is explicitly impersonal.

Now, is something true because there is an objective truth or is it true because you believe it to be true and as a result, it becomes your truth?

Let’s say you go see a “fake” psychic who tells you you’ll own a successful business one day. You believe it to be true (and the psychic to be legit), which puts the conviction that you’ll be an entrepreneur one day at the forefront of your consciousness. Within two years, you’ve manifested your business into reality.

I may never know if I have “star-being DNA” and came to earth after watching its decay from an evolved consciousness afar, as my psychic tells me. What I do know, though, is that the belief, the conviction, that I’m here to help evolve human consciousness, however big or small, is a profound foundation (and perhaps prerequisite) for creating a reality in which I do.