When Skeptics Become Advocates

A long time ago I first read Michael Crichton’s essay “Travels with My Karma: The psychic adventures of a skeptic with an open mind,” first published in Esquire magazine in May 1988 *. It was roughly 3-4 years before the high strangeness events began in my home that are detailed in THE SPACE PEN CLUB book. It was a revealing read! Many will know Crichton’s name because he penned so many books that become popular movies (Jurassic Park, The Andromeda Strain, The Great Train Robbery) and or TV shows (ER, et. al). Prolific and profound – at least in the Karma essay (I’m not a big fan of sci-fi) -- this piece talked about his experiences visiting various psychics while living in London in 1978. It was later folded into a book of collected essays simply called Travels.

Highly suspicious of these seers or soothsayers’ abilities and accuracy, he went around to a bunch of them and had readings, each one using different techniques. One elderly woman he met was nearly blind. To his surprise, Crichton discovered that many knew unknowable details about his life and work that were spot on! These experiences led him on – for lack of a better term – “a psychic journey” -- wherein he later would learn to channel while living in California. Soon he was doing astral travel, guided by someone named Gary.

He got his mind blown on the astral plane!

Remember, this was a highly trained, talented and educated man who was a doctor. But the seeker in him, who pursued many outwardly adventures during his life as this inner-bound one including filmmaking, was transfixed and later transformed by the experiences. In short, he became an advocate for exploring the inner realms through different techniques, and his bold skepticism soon faded to black. Perhaps the most dramatic part of his Karma story was encountering his father on the astral plane, a figure with whom he had unresolved differences, differences that he sought to confront and comfort through psychotherapeutic analysis. He was on the couch.

SPOILER ALERT: But his one brief encounter on the “plane” with his dad produced the cathartic healing that anyone in analysis of any kind often strives for -- sometimes over many years, and frequently with no satisfying result. Working with Gary and one other woman, he later goes on to relate the “removal” of a couple different entities (which looked like cartoon figures, as he describes them) that had been inhabiting and inhibiting his inner world and psychically tripping him up or preventing him from fuller self-realization (although it’s hard to think somebody so gifted and celebrated who accomplished so much as being held back by anything).

Seekers, Warrior Poets and An Embarrassment of Riches!

It’s quite a piece of writing, full of wisdom and wonder, and it reminds me of two well-known figures from the so-called UFO world, Dr. John Mack from Harvard, who worked with alleged abductees, and Dr. J. Allen Hynek, who defined the Close Encounters terminology, the classification categories that have been in play for decades now.  Allen also participated in various U.S. Air Force UFO projects such as SIGN, GRUDGE and the infamous Project Blue Book. I just finished Mack’s’ biography recently, THE BELIEVER -- written by one Ralph Blumenthal, who co-wrote the explosive UFO/UAP New York Times stories with the ubiquitous Leslie Kean.

Like Crichton, Mack is revealed by Blumenthal to be a genuine seeker, too. The late Harvard professor even undertook some personal growth work with poet Robert Bly in Bly’s celebrated “Men’s groups” set up around the country – helping stuck guys get in touch with their inner “Warrior archetypes” through various things like chanting and drumming in the woods with other men. That’s a simplistic view, but you get the idea hopefully.

Bly was no stranger to me and my friends in the Space Pen Club at St. John’s University in central Minnesota. He often would lecture and give poetry readings there, sometimes with other poets from around the world. He was a wonderful reader of his and others works, often repeating a favorite phrase or phrases several times to underscore the poem’s beauty and or meaning.

As for Hynek, he went from being a died-in-the-wool scientific skeptic about the existence of UFOs to becoming a champion for their deeper study, exclaiming at one point that there “an embarrassment of riches” in terms of hard UFO data – IF only skeptics and other doubters would look at the information!

When skeptics become advocates for things they once doubted and maybe even ridiculed, the world opens to them in surprising and inviting new ways. We could all learn from these learned men, who had the personal fortitude to investigate ideas and realities once considered beneath consideration.

*Crichton’s Esquire story is unfortunately behind a paywall but well worth the read! I know, I’ve read my hard copy of it several times over the years since it was first published in ’88.

If interested, check it here: https://classic.esquire.com/article/1988/5/1/travels-with-my-karma

Image: Living Life Fearless