JEFFREY MISHLOVE, Ph.D.: Hello and welcome. Our topic tonight is "Seeing the Soul," and my guest, Carol Ann Dryer, is one of the most well known psychic consultants in the United States, with practices in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York. Carol was recently described as a person who "changed my life," according to Tina Turner in her recent autobiography, I, Tina, and she has been an inspiration to writers, artists and scientists throughout the United States. Carol, welcome.
CAROL DRYER: Thank you, Jeffrey.
MISHLOVE: It's a pleasure to have you here.
DRYER: It's a pleasure to be here.
MISHLOVE: I might acknowledge you myself a little bit right now as we begin, as one of the person who was an inspiration in initiating the Thinking Allowed TV series.
DRYER: Well, that wasn't necessary, absolutely. I'm glad to be here.
MISHLOVE: Let me begin by talking about your own development as a person who now has a career as a psychic consultant. You mention in some of your own literature, Carol, that this is an ability that in a way was with you since birth. In fact, your ability to see the soul the way you do is somehow related to your ability to remember your own birth.
CARYER: Well, that's several pieces of the pie right there. But when everybody asks me, as they always do, when did I first realize that I was psychic, I have to take pause and tell them that I didn't realize that I was, I had to realize that everyone else wasn't. I attribute a lot of my ability to remember to the fact that I had a very easy birth, and so there was a very little amount of trauma. And I have seen, in the over seven thousand people that I have seen throughout the United States, that the degree to which we can maintain that ability to know and see and experience our own soul level, is the degree of trauma that we have had in our lives, and if our origin was less traumatic, if our beginning was less traumatic, we have more memory. But there is not a personal life that was not born psychic, and the level of trauma at the birth is the level to which they shut it off or say, "I don't need this; I have enough trouble now dealing with what's been dealt me in this delivery or in these first years of life."
MISHLOVE: In your case you had an easy birth but a difficult childhood, and began to shut down for awhile.
DRYER: Yes, my birth, and up to probably about four or five years old I always slept with my arms wide open, with a smile on my face, because I totally understood that what I was here for was that song of joy which my name means, Carol. And then I began to realize that even adults were moving at a slower pace than I was in their ability to conceive of things, and then that led me, to as I started school, to stop seeing and stop perceiving and stop being so open and happy. I began to be unhappy, and that lasted until I was in my twenties. And then I realize I went from unhappy to absolutely miserable, because when I shut off the ability to see and feel, as I had, there was so little left of life that I felt like what was the purpose? Finally, at the time that I felt that life wasn't worthwhile anymore, I stated to the universe or whoever was listening, "I'm either going to die or get better, but I'm not going on any further the way that I am now." That was really the dawn of this career, and that was fourteen, fifteen years ago now, where I just made a demand on life and myself and the universe, and from that moment on it got better and better and better.
MISHLOVE: Now, I suppose in a sense your experience is not that uncommon, in that many, many people have the creativity drained from them in the process of being educated.
DRYER: Being educated, just surviving, for the most part being alive. Being alive is a very difficult process. We have a mechanism within us, called our ego and our intellect, to help us with that process. The ego and the intellect are always defining, labeling and analyzing, and those are none of the work of the soul and seeing and feeling. So in order to survive in the world, the ego and the intellect make a pact, and they decide and decipher and analyze, and out of the data that is given us by our environment we create a model or a mode of life or being that may be nothing of what life or our being is really about. So the struggle is to bypass the ego and get back to the soul and the spirit, beyond just surviving. And finally we're at a place, I feel, in humankind, that we are beyond surviving now, that we have our needs met, and we are exploring and expanding into a level of becoming aware again of our soul and our spirit.
MISHLOVE: So basically what you're suggesting is that each human being has this aspect -- the soul aspect, the spirit aspect -- and some of the powers that we hear about, psychic abilities, are associated with this portion of ourselves. And as our ego develops so strongly, and gets involved in intellectual activity, and in thinking about protecting itself, and thinking about survival, it somehow acts to cut off that soul awareness.
DRYER: The ego is kind of like the parents, is the ego when you are a child, because it sees that if you're going out in the street, your parent will say "Stop" and grab your arm. The ego will do the same thing. If it sees you're going up an avenue that you have not experienced before, whether it's in a feeling way, in a way of your spirit, or in a way of your soul, it will grab you by the arm and say, "No, don't go." The fear about getting into psychic things, and the fear of exploring our deep feelings, the fear of crying when we're touched or moved, is the ego saying, "Now, wait a minute, wait a minute; we've got everything under control. Don't worry about a thing." It becomes our parent. And we have a hard time graduating from one level to another. We graduate from high school, we graduate from school, and we can graduate from our parents, but then we have that ego that we hardly ever graduate from, until something either causes a breakdown or a breakthrough. And usually breakdown precedes breakthrough. Most people get hung up in the breakdown part of it, because the ego gets terrified and thinks that it's the loss of beingness.
MISHLOVE: And yet I would think that we wouldn't necessarily want to break free of our ego the way we break free of our parents. Maybe the goal might be more to have it work in harmony with the other parts of us.
DRYER: It is. And the interesting thing is, most people don't even know what a spirit or a soul is, or an ego. They just hear that it's something that you shouldn't have a lot of. I have kind of come back on the scene in my classes to say you must honor your ego, but you also have a sort of conference with that trinity within you, and realize that each part of your soul and your spirit and your ego has a part in your body. The heart is operated by the spirit. The soul operates through the will. And the ego operates through the intellect. So the one that gets to be the bully and the bad guy and the biggie here is the ego and the intellect, because it's smarter. It can outwit that soul and that spirit. That heart sometimes gets forgotten, and its feeling level, and the spirit is left. And the soul who has the strong desire gets left. And the ego, when you sit down with it and discuss that, "This is not going to annihilate you; this, what I am venturing forth into, is not going to be an annihilation," then the ego settles down. It's just like telling your parent, "Listen, I'm going away for the weekend, but I'm going here, and I'm going there, and I'm going to be fine, and I'm going to be taking care of the ego will. Settle back and take a back seat." This is why it's important for all things of the spirit and the soul to be done in a guided way. Like meditation -- you're not going to want to meditate when you're driving on the freeway. You're not going to want to meditate when you're in the middle of a class experience or you're learning something. You're not going to want to meditate when you're shopping, or get a great idea, a soul inspiration, when you're picking up the baby from the babysitter.
MISHLOVE: Because the ego would feel a little threatened in these cases.
DRYER: Well, the ego needs to be in charge in those cases. The ego needs to be in charge when you're driving. That's what happens on long-distance drives. The ego thinks, "Well, I can sit down and relax." The spirit takes over, and on a long drive we'll start to hallucinate. Then we think, "I didn't have a drink at the last stop. Why am I seeing people running across the road?" The spirit sees all kinds of things. At any point that it lets go of the reality that we're looking at, it sees more things than just this reality.
MISHLOVE: If I'm interested, say, in cultivating my ability to see with my soul, to see with my spirit, I kind of need to call a conference together.
DRYER: Right. First of all, we have to identify who's who and what's what and where those different parts of us are operating. Because you have to realize that a person who is very soulful is very willful, and has a strong will. You can have a tremendously soulful person who creates amazing art work, or is a wonderful singer or dancer, but if he doesn't have a strong ego that can put him out there in the world, he's the suffering artist, the struggling one.
MISHLOVE: Let's define the soul a little bit more. You mentioned that the spirit operates the heart.
DRYER: Operates through the heart.
MISHLOVE: The spirit operates through the heart --
DRYER: In the body. Because the spirit only exists in the body by our choice. We choose a body for our soul and our spirit to operate in, and that body then has an ego, and the ego is kind of the operator, the conductor.
MISHLOVE: And the soul, you mentioned, is the will.
DRYER: The soul is our desires, and the will is that which creates contact with the desire body, and the desires are that which is of the father. The word itself means "de" which is "of," and "sire" which is "the father." So desires are of the father. That which you desire, that which is your will, is God's will. It is deeply seated in us, and we never realize that that is such an important place to know. We must know what our true desires are, which are different than wants and wishes. For wants are from the ego -- wants and needs and wishes -- because the ego needs to eat, and the ego needs to sleep, and the ego needs new clothes. But the soul desires to be a great painter, to be a great dancer, to be a great writer, to be a great speaker.
MISHLOVE: And often, as we grow up, I suppose these things become confused.
DRYER: Very confused.
MISHLOVE: We're also told by our parents and teachers and so on what we should desire, and we often kind of get lost in that then.
DRYER: The parent's ego says, "What do you mean, you want to go into space? You want to get in my business building houses. You want to follow your father's business, and his father before him." --"No, I want to build houses in space." Oh, it's such a difficult thing to look at that. We first have the structure of our ego of our parents. Then we have our structure of our ego of our own body that is trying to keep agreement with that, because that's how our needs get met. And the spirit and the soul are always struggling to say, "But what about me? I created this. I created this. God and I had a conference about what we wanted, and we created this ego and we created this body, and we asked our parents if we could come, and we came down from this." We just tell our parents we're going to come, and we just come down here and everything gets forgotten. I believe that really life is ninety percent remembering what we came here for. But we first have to realize we did come here for something. And if you look at the deepest desires, that's the secrets of what you came here for.
MISHLOVE: When you look at the soul of another person -- you describe it as "seeing with my heart" -- you see pictures. You get a lot of visual images.
DRYER: What happens when I am seeing someone else's soul, is I have to work through all three bodies. Because the soul and the spirit have no voice. They are non-language-oriented; they are subvocal. And the ego, working with the intellect, is a vocal place. So all three bodies are in alignment when I sit with someone, and I see better with the eyes of my heart, virtually. I close my eyes, and see through that area of the spirit and the soul connected together, where I feel very deeply the other person -- their feelings, their fears, their anxieties. And as I say them to them, they're dumbfounded that that is precisely the fear they have, and it comes from closing my eyes, closing off the ego identification that this is what this person looks like, or what they act like or what they're sitting like. And it goes into the level of seeing with the spirit -- eyes of the heart and eyes of the soul. Because in that place they are both very visual. The ego is not visual only by identification: "Like that, that's like, that means that, that looks like a box, this must be a this, this looks like a chair, this must be a place to sit."
MISHLOVE: So you also have to interpret what you see.
That must be tricky.
DRYER: It is a gift that I have had all of my life, by virtue of interest. This is the difficult part about teaching psychics to be psychic, is that certain people do have a special gift for being able to hook the symbols together. A Jungian analyst has to learn to hook the symbols together, so needless to say, Jungian analysts, which are a large body of my clientele, simply love to come in for a session with me, because I hook the images together with great ease or facility. This to me is the greatest part of the gift of being psychic. It is not something necessarily that comes with the territory, but as you open more and more to your own heart and your own feelings, you begin to realize by observation what other people's feelings are also.
MISHLOVE: You know, in some ways, Carol, it's extraordinary to have a successful career as a professional psychic in American culture in the 1980s, which officially doesn't even recognize the existence of this work. There's so much social pressure against it. I know that you have to deal with that from time to time, and I think, as a social comment, it must also affect many other people who are developing these abilities, and they get off balance, and in effect they give the field a reputation of being flakey, because many people can hardly balance their checkbook when they get into psychic work.
DRYER: Well, that's a good case in point of the spirit being stronger than the ego and the soul. That happens if there's been tremendous trauma in the life. You'll just check out. The ego will just say, "Forget it," and you'll just have the spirit. That's the one that can't remember where they parked the car; but, boy, they can tell you all about your brothers and sisters, and what your mother's maiden name was, and how many dollars you have in your account. But it is simply because the spirit is everywhere. It's like the wind. But unless it is contained within an ego, it cannot define very well, because the ego through the intellect gives us definition. So that's how a lot of psychics get flakey connotations, is because they are very psychic, but they are also not able to operate well because the ego isn't as strong as the spirit is.
MISHLOVE: We seem to be living at a time where, although this work is not officially recognized, the grass-roots interest is just burgeoning, it seems to be just growing. And I would think that many, many people who are not so-called psychics, but just amongst our viewers, find that they are also developing these new insights, these new ways of seeing, and it must be very tricky, I should think, for the average person today to integrate this. I run into so many people who seem to be confused.
DRYER: Well, a lot of times their psychic awareness does happen after a trauma, after a blow on the head, after a loss of someone, because for a moment there are those dips in your reality, those little dips. And where there's a dip, psychic energy gathers, and if you don't know what to do with the bombarding of energy and information that you're getting, it can be overwhelming. That's where again I keep wanting to stress, do not destroy your ego. Do not go into situations where they say, "You've got to get rid of your ego. Your ego is the destructive one," because the ego is your necessary partner here on earth. The ego's place to survive is only on earth. The spirit and the soul exist all throughout the universe, as well as in the body, by your choice. But the ego's only realm is here. So if the ego is too strong, it overwhelms the soul and spirit. If it's too weak, the spirit and soul can't function because there is no defining process. It's kind of like a divining rod, that if you have no words to speak -- it's kind of like the play here in San Francisco, Fences, where this one at the end says, "Well, that's how it is," when the St. Peter's light comes on. He couldn't articulate what was happening when his brother went to heaven. But that's how it is. He was the crazy one. He couldn't articulate that he knew. He knew. We often consider people who are psychic crazy, and there's a tremendous amount of people in mental hospitals today -- or not today so much as they were in the past. There are people that I have seen as clients, that have spent time committed, and I said, "Goodness, if only you had known that you were just in a total, incredible psychic overload state."
MISHLOVE: Well, maybe it's not appropriate for people to want to develop psychic abilities. I guess it is if they desire, but --
DRYER: I think that in some cases it's not, if a husband
and wife are arguing about, "Well, come to this class and you'll become
aware and things will be better." It has to be a willingness, just like
the Course in Miracles says that when there is a willingness a thousand
angels will meet you and join you. There has to be a willingness. And if
there isn't, if you drag somebody kicking and screaming, it can be very
destructive, very destructive indeed, because the balance will not take
place. Because the willingness to explore the level of the soul, to explore
the arenas and the things that the spirit can do and see, is very necessary,
number one -- I mean, you just have to have the willingness. So it cannot
be forced. You also can't go and buy it somewhere. You can't just take
a one-two-three-four kind of training and expect to open up your ability
to see and to know. You must be very curious. If you are a very willful
child, or the black sheep of the family, if you can answer yes to "You
always wanted to go your own direction and find your own answers; you weren't
quite satisfied with what society gave you, or what the teacher gave you,
or what your parents gave you," you are already on a psychic path, which
is the path of the soul. Psychic means of or pertaining to the soul. And
spirit is that part of us which is inspired
-- in the beginning, origin, breath; we inspire, inspiratus.
It is that which brings into the body the spirit, it's through the breath.
When we lose our breath, it's the only thing in the body we can't live
without. We can live without an arm, without a leg, and sometimes temporarily
without a heart even, if you're going be transplanted, or get a mechanical
heart. The reason why I feel those haven't worked is because you cannot
transfer spirit to spirit by using mechanical means, because at the moment
that heart is stopped and another one is replaced there has to be transmission
again of the spirit replacing it, to inspire another life. If you've had
a death experience, if you've had a near-death experience, if there's been
any time without breath, people will come back and say what an incredible
experience they had, because their spirit has left and then their spirit
returned again.
MISHLOVE: You often use the term the aura, and it's another common term. How do you relate the notion of that to the notion of the ego, the spirit, and the soul?
DRYER: Well, if there's simply an ego operating in the body, which is possible -- there can be people with no spirit and no soul operating -- there is no color in the aura. It is simply an etheric body, or just an outline of light.
MISHLOVE: Let's just step back, just a second, for those who don't know at all what we're referring to. Let's give a general definition of what is meant by aura.
It's light that you see around the body?
DRYER: Well, it's not just that I see it. It's an electromagnetic field around the body that is not just what I see. It's been talked about and seen for thousands and thousands of years. When we think about the saints with a halo around them, or light emanating from the body, that is the etheric body extended.
MISHLOVE: The etheric body is another term for aura?
DRYER: No, it is the first part of the aura. Like when we look at a light bulb and look away, and you still see that phantom image. That's what it will look like, if you ever see that glowing light around someone.
MISHLOVE: Like a few inches.
DRYER: Right, a few inches. When a child colors in a coloring book and goes beyond the lines, and then we tell it, "No, no, no," essentially the child is right, because it is coloring the color that extends beyond the form. Because when you see color around someone's head, or around their arm, or around their heart or their stomach, whether it's a dark color or a light color, that is the energy field of the aura. That's seeing it. The colors in the aura mimic the seven colors in the rainbow, which have to do with the seven seals or the seven wheels of energy within the body. You will not find these if you take a class on dissecting the human body. They are wheels of energy which exist when the inspiratus, or the inspiration of breath, occurs -- when the spirit is in the body. Then the energy is alive. When we have our last breath, our last dying breath, and the spirit is no longer present, the aura is no longer present. I would see no aura on a body that was dead. I would see no aura, would see a very limited aura, on a body that was unconscious.
MISHLOVE: So there's this aspect of the aura, the electromagnetic aspect. But then you also see, as you describe it, other pictures -- images, thought forms, that people are holding.
DRYER: Well, that's a little bit deeper, mystical work that I do. It's not just seeing the colors. There was a Swedish mystic named Swedenborg, whose work was the first verification that I wasn't the only one that saw this way. He was alive about five hundred years ago, and he spoke of the definition of seeing pictorials within a color around the body, and the color would change, and the pictures would change, but they were little visual histories of a person. When I was first given that by one of the writers that I work with, I was so heartwarmed and thankful that someone else, five hundred years ago, saw the way I saw, because again it was a surprise to me that other people did not see this -- that when you close your eyes you don't see pictures of someone's history. It's like watching little history movies.
MISHLOVE: Swedenborg, incidentally, was a great scientist. I think it was about two hundred, two hundred and fifty years ago. He was a contemporary of Isaac Newton and Goethe, and very highly regarded as one of the great scientists of his own day. He wrote many books about his visions of the heavenly arcana -- angels and spirits of all sorts.
DRYER: Yes, he took his vision beyond just people. What my work is at this point is basically with people -- about seven thousand two hundred and ninety-three at last count. I should know, this week, seeing as how we're getting into the eight thousand count. But mine is mostly with individuals. My great curiosity about people, which has been all of my life, has been the reason why I do this more for individuals than for groups or for industry, or for other ways. I do work with doctors. I have worked with the police, and then I realized that that wasn't my particular specialty or forte. As someone develops psychically, you realize it's not just to be psychic. There are all kinds of levels of being psychic, and all kinds of uses of being psychic. Whether it's to be a better writer, a better artist, a better parent, a better anything, you can use psychic ability, which is the ability of your soul.
MISHLOVE: In effect, when we talk about using the ninety percent of the brain that's unused, what you're really saying is it's a question of aligning these various aspects.
DRYER: Aligning the body, the body that houses only a capacity, because your soul and your spirit are far beyond the limitation of your physical body. All babies, when they're taken into early life recounting, are so frustrated by the limitation of this very, very tiny form, and that it's held down here by gravity, and it can't just fly off.
MISHLOVE: And yet these little infants are born with so vast potential. I suppose we can really hardly imagine the power of an infant.
DRYER: Well, I could imagine that, because I was a very awake and aware infant, and I realize that I knew that was so and remembered it all my life -- that from three weeks old I had a total consciousness that's exactly the same as my consciousness now.
MISHLOVE: Well, Carol Ann Dryer, it's been a pleasure having you with us now. I think your words have been incredibly moving and inspiring for me. Thank you for being with me.
DRYER: Thank you, Jeffrey.
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