Peter's Psychic Powers
Context: Most of us are aware of psychic scams in which people make money by pretending to see typically "great" futures. There are also people who are sensitive to a variety of cues, some of which appear to be visionary. I'm open to anything that works using a standard risk/reward metric. In other words if something is right 70% of the time and the reward for being right is equal to the risk of being wrong, it's useful, regardless of it's source.
I'm partly writing this because of three facts which I find disturbing, given the importance of a healthy loving relationship: My present relationship, with a wonderful woman has seen us growing enormously as a couple. She has grown 3,600% in life-skills and is stabilizing 400% happier than before, with surges of up to 700% happier. I have grown 300% (I have barely grown at all in some relationships so this puts it in the top four relationships around growth) and my well-being is somewhere between 250-400% happier than when we met. My creativity is up 6,000%. This sounds like a great relationship to me. But not to the Shaman who I paid to "muscle test" our compatibility. He advised me, on our second date, never to see her again. Fortunately, I had already had experience with Peter Sandhill being totally wrong by telling me that one of the worst relationships of my life was "the greatest future he could see." There is only one relationship in between these two extremes that had some great highs and terrible lows. A therapist doing family constellation therapy with me to help sort out the intense emotion I was having around HAI facilitator protocols advised me to continue that relationship, which led to my feeling deeply hurt and betrayed. This is not even 50/50 odds. This is 100% failure on the part of three different "seers" about three relationships in a row. These "psychics" don't apologize for being wrong, keep their fee and are not affected at all by their poor judgment. Now, back to Peter's vision of my best possible future...
While at my house for our 10 hour psychedelic session, I mentioned at the beginning that I was talking online to a Thai woman. Peter Sandhill asked me if I had thought about marrying her. I explained to him that I had only known her a week (at this point Peter interrupted to say A WEEK! as if this was very surprising to him and differed from what he was seeing with his inner eye) and that while she was an important friend, she was the exact opposite of what I was looking for in a partner:
- She would not have sex before marriage and was a virgin - a first for me. I have no drive to "get married" but would certainly never do so without living with someone for some time, including sex.
- She was a full-time government employee of a traditional upper-class Thai home and was studying her PHD and my biggest gripe with women was "Not enough time for relationship."
- She did not live near the ocean and could not travel with her job. I like to swim every day for my health when in Thailand.
- She was very particular about formality. I am too eccentric for some American women, let alone a "proper Thai woman."
I thought this was enough to rule out the relationship and I explained that the only reason I was talking to her is that she seemed incredibly disappointed when I said "let's not talk since it's obvious that we cannot be a good fit and I don't want to lead you on or waste your time." She seemed so unhappy that I agreed we could at least talk. And Peter was asking if I was considering marrying her.
When I inquired "Why do you ask," Peter said that he could see a luminous future and that marrying this woman was the very best future he could imagine for me. This was surprising, puzzling and intriguing. Since I was at this point hiring Peter as a Shaman, and since no other shaman or Psychic had made anything like this bold pronouncement, I was inclined to look at it as a new phenomena worth entertaining, though it made no sense on a rational level.
After completing the 10 hour session with Peter I started to move towards my trip to Thailand at the end of the week. I was talking with two Thai women. Both had read the book that I had written for Thai women ("Successfull Relationships with Farang." Everyone who is not Thai is a "Farang," or "foreinger). One woman was an English teacher who was happy to meet me at the airport, spend time on the Islands with me, and was completely laid back and lovely. Then there was the woman Peter had recommended that I marry. She hated the idea of me spending time with any other woman, while being absolutely clear that the only way we could spend time together was the following:
- I would fly to Bangkok.
- Then I would fly to her home town, where there were no places to swim, no nice hotels to stay at and no one who spoke English.
- There I would wait in a dingy motel while she worked 8-12 hours a day.
- She would be permitted, as is customary for an unmarried Thai Virgin, to visit me for a few hours for dinner with a chaperon.
- If I was very lucky she might even be able to persuade the chaperon to give us a few minutes alone.
- Then she would go home and the process would repeat.
This sounded terrible! Why was Peter seeing this as my most amazing future?
Most of my relationship choices are not "personal," but logistical in the deep sense of the world. This is a touchy thing to get across. I had nothing at that point against Peter's recommendation personally, but had everything against the logistics of trying to have any kind of win/win relationship. Rather than reject her personally, I countered that I would love to spend time with her. I would in fact love it if someone met me at Bangkok airport, was comfortable with our sexuality, would spend time for 1-2 weeks getting to know each other without any chaperon or other cultural pressures, and we could see how compatible the relationship was at this point. For this invitation I was loudly lambasted as "rude and insensitive," which I told her was a good reason she should choose a traditional Thai husband and support my choice to meet with the woman who was delighted with my style and did not think it rude and insensitive at all. So I confirmed with the first woman and despite Peter's assertions about my best future, was all set to meet her at the airport. But that's when Peter's choice of mate started revealing a pattern that would repeat itself throughout the relationship. From saying that she did not even want to speak to me because I was so "rude" she took my request that she respect my choice to meet with the person who was compatible as a challenge. She announced that she was going to meet me at the airport, whether I liked it or not. I said "I already have an appointment." "Too bad. I'm coming." This is when Peter's comments kicked in. I had never had this happen to me with seventy women as partners, including several prior Thai women. So I took Peter's brass announcement that I should get married, plus this woman's passionate insistence, plus the fact that she did have one great point: She was a meticulous communicator (it turned out she spent four hours a day translating my e-mails and replying to every sentence with fluent English, making her the best communicator I have ever met and that was one of my sore points with lovers and friends). So feeling embarrassed and uneasy, I called up the first woman, on my layover, to tell her that another woman was insisting on being there and I thought it best to not have a scene at the airport. I was very sorry, I said, but I wanted to cancel our planned visit. This was obviously a mistake - the kind of mistake one can apparently make when the therapist you have just fallen in love with and he escalated recommends marriage to a complete stranger with terrible compatibility.
To cut a long story very short (it takes up more than 100 pages in the book) I did meet the woman Peter suggested at the airport. Far from being a soothing way to integrate the session Peter seemed so reluctant to integrate, it took me from a very raw place into deep grief, loneliness and invisibility, as both this Woman, Peter, and myself allowed my needs to take second place to Peter's need to be right and her need to follow culture and tradition.
It had a number of serious fallouts:
1) The worst two months I have ever had in what is normally my favorite country on earth.
2) Developing a mild case of PTSD.
3) The woman lost her PHD in progress and a government job she had worked for two years to get.
4) Her family "lost face" because a hotel staff where we hung out gossiped.
5) I spend $60,000. in cash and time off work to have a deep adrenal collapse.
6) The woman could not get out of bed for a month in deep depression when it ended.
7) I had to get physically assertive to protect my boundaries for only the second time in my life with a partner.
Throughout a long a tedious process taking more than eight months, in which the logistics never lined up or became any more intelligible then they were at the beginning, Peter Sandhill made frantic time to support this relationship till it's doom, continuing to insist that "This is the brightest future I can see for you." I am literally weeping alone in a Thai hotel room with shattered nerves paying $175. an hour to confirm that "Yes. This relationship is the most luminous future I see for you." I asked Peter as a friend, "Is this really what you would recommend to someone you cared about?" "All I can say is that this relationship is the best relationship I can see for your future." I spoke to Peter as a paid consultant more than 10 times as this nightmare unfolded and never once did Peter, for a moment, suggest that perhaps he had made a mistake. The last time was when I was back in the U.S. exhausted with adrenal fatigue with some of the worst months of my life behind me. I asked him if he wanted to apologize. He said that his guides were "smiling," but he saw the same thing he always had. Smiling at what? This sounds more sadistic than enlightened, more irrational the luminary.
Context: At this point I was in love with Peter, and left hanging about our personal relationship despite my direct request at the end of the session in which he had asked me to lay on top of him and kiss him, to clarify our personal relationship. I was dissociated from the first psychedelic trip of my life and the 18 hour flight. I was masking my own truths to make Peter feel better, and I was regressed into child by a re-enactment of a parental pattern in which "the parent cannot make mistakes so the child is always wrong." I was asking him, as a parent, to please not "make me continue this nightmare." But Peter cannot make mistakes. He apparently can't integrate the rational side of an equation either. And for the next six months Peter would insist, to this day, that "This is the greatest future he can see for me."
Questions: What are the ethics of "seeing" what's best for someone? When a seer "sees" that someone should walk into a fire "for their best future," do they have any responsibility when they get feedback such as "It's getting really really hot in here and this does not seem like a good direction?" Do good "seers" integrate with physical reality, or is there some mysterious "greater plan" that no amount of short-term insanity, suffering and abuse should deter us from pursuing? Does a good seer need to ask "what is important to you as values?" before giving advice, since one path might be the best path for learning quickly through pain and another path might be the best for learning slowly in luxury and pleasure? Should the teacher, in this case Lynda Cessara, have any responsibility for their students "seeing?" I explained all this to Lynda and like HAI, she chose to ignore the feedback that a fellow-teacher and student of hers is harming students with irrational to the point of dangerous "seeing" that does not adjust or stop just because a client points out all the way it is damaging lives.
Concerns: The HAI facilitators have assigned themselves the right to do therapy and take paid work in the entire psychic domain of relationships and the self. I have never heard a single facilitator say what they can't do professionally. Barbara Musser, another HAI facilitator, learned from another energy teacher than Peter and also charges money for energy work. The only basis for being a HAI facilitator originally was that Stan Dale, said they could do it. When they fail it is as simple as a pattern of denial or blaming the client for their mistakes. Now, apparently, Lynda has told Peter he is a good psychic. So off he goes, charging money for his "seeing" skills, with a similar pattern of "blame the patient, client and victims," rather than own that he could possibly have made a mistake. Far from offering to cover the $60,000. in lost work, health-care and travel expenses resulting from his "recommendations," he has not even offered a refund for a single moment of his practice. And neither has HAI, because "this is not a HAI issue." I wonder how many people have to become disillusioned with HAI's protocols before they become a HAI issue? Facilitator behavior, that would be deemed irresponsible by almost every licensed psychotherapist, trauma specialist and many schools for energy and "seeing" are not a concern for the board or any HAI facilitator, so they must become a concern for HAI's clients who naturally don't want their friends or themselves to suffer the same abuse so the facilitators can make more money to do do things they are not qualified to do in the name of "love." That's the kind of "love" that terrifies people and causes grave harm to people's lives.
Suing For Best Practices at HAI
