The Truth About Psychics: What's Real, What's Not, and How to Tell the Difference - Softcover

Browne, Sylvia

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1451691831 ISBN 13: 9781451691832

Publisher: Atria, 2012

Synopsis

Now in paperback, bestselling celebrity psychic Sylvia Browne traces the history of spirituality and explains the truth about psychics and how to develop your own sensitivity to the spirit world. Psychics and spirituality go as far back as biblical times,

About this title

About the Author

Sylvia Browne grew up in Kansas City, Missouri and revealed her psychic gift at the age of three, announcing that her grandfather was dead (he was) and predicting she would have a baby sister in three years (she did). Browne began her professional career in 1973 with a small meeting in her home. Within a year Browne’s practice had grown so much that she incorporated the business as the Nirvana Foundation for Psychic Research.

Browne was a true professional: she maintained required business licenses, was a member of a national consumer protection agency, and donated a large portion of her time to charitable organizations and also worked with police to investigate missing persons and other criminal cases. She consulted with police and FBI on several high-profile cases, including the disappearance of Chandra Levy and the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. She was the president of her business, now known as the Sylvia Browne Corporation, Browne also founded her own church, the Society of Novus Spirit. Her most recent business venture was The Sylvia Browne Hypnosis Training Center, where her unique, proven hypnosis methods for personal and professional use are taught.

With twenty-two New York Times bestsellers, Browne was an accomplished author of more than 46 books. She appeared regularly on the Montel Williams Show for seventeen years, and was a frequent guest on Larry King Live, traveled the country at sold-out lectures, and regularly appeared in the print media. She lived and practiced in California, where she passed in 2013.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

1
MY OWN ODYSSEY BEGINS

I can’t imagine my life as a psychic without a lifetime equally devoted to God and spirituality.

But then, I can’t imagine any life on this rough earth without the comfort, healing, purpose, and joy to be found in God’s arms and in spirituality, where His infinite mysteries and answers lie waiting.

I was lucky (although I would never have used that word when I was a child). I never had to wonder whether the spirit world existed. I knew it did. I saw it, I heard it, and I sensed it all around me, whether I wanted to or not. Without my brilliantly psychic and deeply spiritual grandmother Ada Coil there to explain what was happening and build a bridge between my unique reality and the sanctity of where it came from, I’m sure I would have lost my sanity. (There are those who would argue that the debate about my sanity rages on, but I stopped listening to them decades ago.) Grandma Ada educated me about the gifts I was born with and helped me appreciate them instead of fearing them. She also taught me never to stop questioning, learning, studying, and exploring every aspect of spirituality that keeps our genetic connection to God thriving and relevant. She inspired the spiritual journey to which I’ve devoted my life and gave me her clear footsteps to follow as I started, just as this book is my way of giving you mine.

As some of you already know, I’m a third-generation psychic. Among my particular gifts from birth were clairvoyance (the ability to see beings that originate in other dimensions) and clairaudience (the ability to hear voices and sounds that originate in other dimensions). For added flair, I was even born with a caul, or fetal membrane, around my head, which according to ancient legend is the sign of a psychic child. So when the spirit world came to me long before I would ever have thought of seeking it out, I didn’t understand it at first, but there was certainly no mistaking it.

I was five years old when I had my first psychic vision. We were at a family dinner when I looked over to see the faces of both my great-grandmothers melting like lava running slowly down their necks, leaving nothing but their skulls behind. The only thing that shocked me even more than this horrifying sight was the fact that no one else seemed to be seeing it but me—either that or they were awfully nonchalant about it. Less than two weeks later, both great-grandmothers died. And with the logic of a child, I was sure that somehow, because I was the only one who’d seen those melting faces, I was responsible for killing them. It was Grandma Ada who explained that I’d done nothing wrong, I’d just been given a visual form of psychic information about their impending deaths.

At around that same time I discovered (or, in my opinion, was inflicted with) the random, involuntary ability to view the insides of people who had serious medical conditions, as if I were looking at an X-ray. A neighbor or family friend or door-to-door salesman would stop by and all I would see was a blocked colon or a diseased gallbladder floating around the room.

I turned to Grandma Ada again, asking how I could go about getting rid of this supposed “gift” so that I wouldn’t have to spend the rest of my life surrounded by melting faces and ravaged organs. She patiently pointed out that God gave me this gift, and gave it to me for a reason, so refusing it wasn’t an option. I could, though, ask Him in my prayers not to show me anything I wasn’t old enough or emotionally equipped to handle. I did that, and my prayers were answered. The visions didn’t go away, but they were never again as graphic and terrifying.

In fact, on a couple of occasions I was grateful for them when they helped to make Grandma Ada very happy. One night she was terribly upset after unsuccessfully searching the house for a steel strongbox filled with important papers she needed. (Like all psychics, she was psychic about everyone but herself. If you lose your keys, I’ll tell you exactly where they are. If I lose mine, I’m as stumped as you are.) We were in her bedroom when she explained what the problem was, and at that moment a petite white-haired woman materialized, whom I recognized to be Grandma Ada’s mother, and pointed to the back of a massive bureau. I reported this to Grandma Ada, frankly proud to be seeing a spirit she didn’t see for a change, and it jarred her memory of slipping the strongbox behind that bureau months earlier where no one (including her, obviously) would think to look for it.

On another evening we were all gathered in the living room when I saw a man’s form take shape behind Grandma Ada’s left shoulder. I was sitting on the floor beside her and whispered, “Grandma, who is that man behind you?”

My parents had long since learned to ignore this kind of thing, so they just glanced over, saw nothing, rolled their eyes, and went back to their reading while Grandma Ada asked, “What does he look like?”

I described him—tall, reddish hair, round wire-rimmed glasses. Then I added, “There’s a string around his neck, and it has a horn on it that he uses to listen to people’s chests.”

I’d never seen quite so much joy on her face as she instantly recognized it as her Uncle Jim, a doctor who’d died in a flu epidemic twenty-four years earlier. She was thrilled that he was there with her, and I was thrilled that I’d facilitated a reunion that made someone I adored so happy. And between those two spirit encounters with loved ones she missed so much, I started thinking maybe this psychic thing wasn’t so bad after all.

I began seeing spirits as clearly as I saw everyone else. They especially filled my bedroom at night, which frightened me, so Grandma Ada gave me a flashlight. (To this day I can’t sleep in a completely dark room. I’m not frightened anymore—it’s just annoying, like trying to lie down and relax in the middle of a convention.) I also began “knowing things” without having a clue how or why I knew them.

I announced my grandfather’s death to my family several minutes before my father rushed in to break the news.

I answered the door before anyone knocked and knew who was going to be standing there before I opened it.

One afternoon I pulled my father out of a movie theater in a panic screaming, “Sharon can’t breathe!” We arrived home to discover that my little sister had collapsed with double pneumonia, and the doctors said later that Daddy had reached the emergency room with Sharon with only moments to spare.

A little classmate of mine came to show me the crepe paper witch costume she planned to wear for Halloween trick-or-treating that night. The instant she stepped in the door, I “saw” her costume bursting into flames. Within minutes, while she was prancing around the room perfecting her menacing witch moves, she whirled too close to the wall heating grate and, identical to my vision, her costume ignited. I’m convinced that “seeing” this before it actually happened allowed me to help rather than panic, as I immediately threw her to the ground and rolled her up in an area rug before she even had time to scream. She left the house, completely unharmed, to go find a replacement for her ruined costume.

I “saw” my friend Joan violently slamming her head against the dashboard of a blue car, and it was such a clear, horrible vision that I told her about it and begged her not to get in any blue cars for a while. Within weeks she found herself climbing into the passenger seat of a blue car to run errands with a family friend, then remembered my warning and stayed home instead. A few hours later the brakes failed and the blue car was wrapped around a telephone pole. The family friend and the driver’s side suffered minor damage, but the passenger seat where Joan would have been sitting was destroyed.

Of course, I was a child, with what I prefer to look back on as “guileless candor,” so not all of my psychic efforts were humanitarian. I remember showing off by telling my mother where my daddy really was when she thought he was at work, for example, and describing with uncanny accuracy the lovely blond woman he was visiting. (If you’d known my mother, you wouldn’t have blamed my daddy any more than I did. As I’ve often said, my theory about why he never left her is that he didn’t want to have to kiss her goodbye.)

And then one night when I was eight years old, my life changed, and it would never be the same again.

I was in my bedroom, under strict orders to go to sleep, so I was wide awake, playing with my flashlight, shining it idly around the room. Suddenly, with no warning, the light began to grow and intensify until all I could see was a white-gold glow. And from its core I heard a woman’s voice, clear and distinct despite a rapid, unearthly, high-speed chirpiness. “I come from God, Sylvia,” she said. “Don’t be afraid.”

Looking back, I guess I could have found reassurance in the “I come from God” part, or been fascinated that after eight years of being clairvoyant, I could now officially add clairaudience to my list of psychic skills. Instead, I flew out of my bedroom in sheer terror and ran to find Grandma Ada, who was cleaning vegetables in the kitchen. She stroked my hair to comfort me, calmly explained that it was “just” my Spirit Guide, and went back to her carrot peeling.

My Spirit Guide has been a daily presence and a vital part of my life since that night in 1946. She spent her one lifetime on earth as an Aztec Incan and was killed by a spear in 1520 during the Spanish invasion of Colombia. Her real name is Iena, which I apparently didn’t care for, since I’ve never called her anything but Francine.

For those of you who don’t understand exactly what a Spirit Guide (or “control”) is, it’s very much worth explaining, because I promise, you have one too, whether you’re consciously aware of it or not. A Spirit Guide is someone who, when we choose to come back to earth again from the Other Side, agrees to be our constant companion and helpmate while we’re away from Home. They know what we hope to accomplish during our time here, and it’s their divine assignment to encourage, support, and advise us along the way without ever interfering with our decisions or depriving us of our free will. The simple truth is, we’re all here for the further education and growth of our spirits, which we can’t do without making mistakes and learning from them. Our Spirit Guides would defeat the whole purpose of our trips away from Home if they shielded us from the lessons we mapped out for ourselves in the first place.

So now I had these legions of spirits visiting me, Francine chirping away in my ear, and Grandma Ada reassuring me that there was no reason to be frightened of any of it, that it simply proved that we don’t die at all when our lives on earth are over, we go right on living, real as ever, because God promised when He created us that each of us is eternal, which means we always were and we always will be. In the meantime, I was attending Catholic school (part of my Catholic, Lutheran, Episcopalian, Jewish upbringing) and got in serious trouble with one of the nuns one day when she was telling the class about how our spirits survive death. I helpfully chimed in that I knew that was true, because I saw them and talked to them all the time. She essentially called me a liar. I reported this when I got home. Grandma Ada marched down to the school, and the nun never called me a liar again, although the seeds were planted for my reputation as a troublemaker.

By now, though, I was thoroughly confused. We were supposed to believe that our spirits survive death, but it was ridiculous to believe we could see them and communicate with them. What possible sense did that make? And I didn’t just believe we could, I knew we could. I’d been doing it for years. The suggestion that I was imagining my encounters with the spirit world was as jarring to me as someone suggesting that I was imagining my parents, and I needed to understand what the truth was and where exactly these spirits came from. I wasn’t particularly interested in spirituality at the age of ten—“Cincinnati” would have been enough of an answer for me if that’s where spirits lived when they weren’t dropping in at my house.

So Grandma Ada and Francine started telling me about this breathtakingly beautiful place called the Other Side, our real Home, where we all come from for our brief trips to this “boot camp” called earth and where we all return to our busy lives in the perfection of God’s pure, all-encompassing love. It sounded enchanting, if maybe a little too good to be true. I didn’t have the attention span to pay much more attention to it than that at the time, but it sounded a lot more logical to me than what the nuns at school had been telling me. And it turned out to be the core of my relentless passion not too many years later for learning everything there was to know about the spiritual world.

When I was eighteen, Grandma Ada went Home. It was the first great loss in my life, the first time I experienced the bottomless ache of grief. She left with such peace, without a doubt in her soul about where she was going, and thanks to what she and Francine had taught me I knew I wasn’t grieving for her. I was grieving for me, for the unimaginable void she had left behind in my heart.

Two days after she passed away, I was in my bedroom going through the motions of getting dressed when the feeling crept over me that I wasn’t alone. I glanced past my reflection in the mirror and then turned around to look behind me, but no one was there. I’d turned back to the mirror again when I could have sworn I felt a brief warm breath on the back of my neck. I dismissed it as that word Grandma Ada told me a million times should be eliminated from the English language: my imagination.

At that instant two things happened less than a second apart: there was a deafening crack, like a bolt of lightning inside the room, and clear as a bell I heard Grandma Ada’s voice say, “Sylvia!” And then, nothing, except for that intense silence that thickens the air in the wake of an electrical storm.

My heart was pounding as I raced out of the room and literally ran into my daddy, who was running up the stairs as fast as I was running down them.

“Sylvia, what happened? What was that horrible cracking noise? It sounded like the roof collapsed. Are you all right? You’re white as a sheet.”

I was still trembling as I described the previous couple of minutes. Not much surprised him anymore, and he just smiled and held me and said, “You know, your grandmother told you she was going to send you a sign to let you know that she made it Home safely. I guess she kept her promise. But that loud crack scared the hell out of me. What was it?”

I had no idea, but I was determined to find out, because I knew it was a sound, and a moment, from somewhere other than earth, connected to Grandma Ada, and I wanted to know everything about it.

That deafening crack, it turned out, is called a “rapport.” It’s the spirit world’s version of a sonic boom. Occasionally, when a spirit pierces the invisible veil between the high-frequency dimension of the Other Side and our significantly lower frequency here on earth, it creates exactly the same shock waves in the atmosphere that any other object creates when it travels faster than the speed of sound. Those shock waves cause sudden, intense buildups and releases of atmospheric pressure, and it’s the release of that pressure that causes sonic booms—and rapports.

According to a lot of experts, including Francine, it’s not all that uncommon for rapports to accompany spirit visit...

About this edition

• Publisher: Atria
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 1451691831
• ISBN 13: 9781451691832
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272