Meet the Professionals

Professional predictions support our decision making in many everyday situations. We plan tomorrow's events by listening to the weather forecast, change political tactics according to polling predictions, make financial investments based on market trends and maintain an awareness of earthquake and natural disaster probabilities. Most of these forecasts are based on the accumulation and interpretation of hard data, though professionals at the top of their fields probably acknowledge an extra touch of intuition, a certain 'nose for the job'. The business of prediction is certainly a potentially lucrative one for those who get results for their clients.

Professional clairvoyants, or psychics, make predictions based on extrasensory input, not on hard data. They may specialise in various fields, from business to finance, health, politics, the global economy or earth changes, but they are popularly consulted for insights into people's personal futures. They may use a variety of prompts, including tarot cards, playing cards, crystals, the client's jewellery, or nothing visual at all. They may talk directly with you or communicate through spirits or guides. They may work through advertisement or through word of mouth and operate from alternative centres, markets, fairs, tea rooms, spiritualist churches, offices or their own homes. There are those who prefer to work at a distance, consulting via the telephone, internet or by mail. Some answer questions, some prefer their clients to remain silent and others choose to have nothing more than a name and address to work on. They vary from the genuinely accurate to the well intentioned but inaccurate, and from the fraudulently brilliant to the fraudulently carefree.

My research interest was to meet and interview in depth four clairvoyants with a popular reputation for accuracy, to discover what light their experiences could throw on the nature of precognition. I made it known that I was looking for recommendations of accurate psychics and kept a list, finally narrowing it down by focussing on their differences. Each answered a preprepared questionnaire (see Appendix 2) and also agreed to an interview.

I slowed the car to a crawl as I inspected the house numbers adorning the mail boxes, finally stopping outside number 32. A woman sat at her desk, phone in hand, cameoed in the bay window of her home which is also her consultation office. Margaret Stuart's reputation as a seer and problem solver is international and with a list of regular overseas clients willing to pay the costs of lengthy phone conversations on top of her professional reading fees, this woman's story begged my attention.

Margaret welcomed me with a businesslike handshake and showed me towards a big, comfortable armchair, while she settled herself into its partner and tilted her head towards me expectantly. "It's going to be interesting to be interviewed by someone who knows something about precognition and can talk my language", she said excitedly. Her tailored jacket, her spectacles and the piles of paper on her large antique desk defined a corporate businesswoman with an intellectual bent. Although she had been working as a full-time clairvoyant problem solver for sixteen years, Margaret had also found the time to write several internationally successful books, including Switch on Your Brain, How to Write Essays and Release the Genius. She has several degrees to her name, including a Diploma in Criminology and was once Head of the English Department at an exclusive secondary school.

A well-known name on the public speaking circuit, Margaret was, in former years, treated as a bit of a guru, being a regular guest on the national television chat shows.

"From when I was born, I've always been aware of being psychic, clairvoyant or clairaudient", Margaret started. "Mum and I used to carry on conversations sitting at the dinner table and we'd only realise at the end of the conversation that we had never verbalised anything. She was telepathic too. Because she never ridiculed it or denied it, I was free to explore it. We never called it clairvoyance or anything like that, it was just 'Mum and Margaret talking'."

Margaret works with people to help them solve the subconscious problems which are holding them back from achieving their full potential. Some people would rather avoid looking at their difficulties and just shoot to the bottom line, especially if it's a rosy one. If pressed, Margaret will supply; for example,

"One lady rang and she said 'Can you just do a reading for me?'. I scanned her and I said 'Within eight weeks you're going to marry a dark haired fellow who comes from South America and he's got eight brothers and sisters'. Six or seven weeks later she phoned again and said 'I've just got married. He's South American, he's got dark hair and he has eight brothers and sisters'. Since she hadn't known him at the time of the reading I hoped that she hadn't met him, seen that everything fitted into line, and therefore married him. During the reading I had warned her: 'You've still got your own free will, your own choice at any stage.' "

Recognition of free will is the crux of Margaret's approach to her work.

"I don't believe there's anything that's absolutely immutable. The person is always responsible for whatever occurs in his life. Once the person accepts this, then he can change his life."

The old image of a genuine clairvoyant as being someone who has open access to all the details of a predetermined, fixed future does not fit Margaret. Yet here is a lady who can give an accurate description of an unlikely marriage in six or seven weeks time to a client who has no man in her life at the time of her reading! What kind of future was this? "I believe I see possible futures", Margaret explained.

Margaret's marketed ability is that she can hear her client's subconscious thoughts as clearly as if they were speaking aloud. She will only tune in with her client's permission but, once given, she believes she can access all subconscious thought on a time line from before birth to death. Before birth can include, in Margaret's opinion, information imprinted on the subconscious from past lives. The subconscious, according to Margaret, not only carries detailed information about the past but is already at work determining the future. Our past experiences, fears, thoughts and programming affect how we approach our future, so Margaret can get a good picture of the client's future based on where his subconscious is at now. If something happens to alter that subconscious programming, then the whole future picture shifts and the client finds himself on a different path. This is a relatively rational line of thought. Few people would disagree with the idea that our subconscious thoughts greatly affect how we approach our lives. What is more difficult to grasp is how Margaret can project ahead from a present subconscious mindset to see specific details unfolding within specific time frames such as her client's surprise wedding to an unknown South American man.

Before continuing, Margaret paused to show me how she questions her clients' subconscious minds directly. As well as hearing subconscious messages, she tests the subconscious to target precise information. Usually she is after details such as age, emotions, names and places. With my permission to access my subconscious, her fingers begin to tap furiously, as if of their own accord. Occasionally her whole arm agitated in circles or swung back and forth as if angrily crossing out a page of writing: she had apparently picked up on a thought pattern and was silently consulting my subconscious as to how old I was when this particular thought was lodged. Her rapid finger movements were giving her quick-fire yes and no answers as she ran through possible ages and emotions connected with this thought pattern. She ran, she told me later, the gamut of selected emotions in her mind: fear, love, forgiveness, guilt ... until the finger tapped a resolute positive response, and so it continued. The violent scribbling movements were associated with anger at four years of age, she said, which needed releasing. Each movement led to a deeper level of emotion, somewhat like peeling back the layers of an onion until the whole pattern was revealed. The demonstration came to an end as Margaret turned towards me and resumed interviewee pose.

I asked Margaret how much work her clients needed to do once a subconscious block was identified, in order to set their future on a more desirable path.

"Once you've hit the actual block, it takes just a second. The subconscious mind deals only with 'now' and has no judgement of right or wrong, so once an emotion is recognised and no longer needed, it erases it, like pushing an erase key on a computer. With the subconscious programming out of the way, the person can see the problem more clearly and logically and see what needs to be changed."

Margaret gave an example of a client who was involved in multi-level marketing:

"He had got as far as 'emerald level', which gives an income of about $160,000 a year, when everything, including each leg of his downline, collapsed. It seemed inexplicable. He was still working in the same way, but not getting anywhere until I discovered the block. When he was single he had been really poor and he had struggled to pay off an emerald engagement ring over a long period of time. As soon as he hit emerald level his subconscious mind triggered his belief in being poor and struggling, and so he became poor and struggling. What he had to do was mentally think back to nineteen, when he bought the ring and release the conditioning that emerald meant poor and struggling. That done, the fifty-year-old was instantly released too. Now the emerald level is no problem to him."

One woman flew over to Australia to consult Margaret face to face. She'd had diarrhoea for years and was unable to cure it or find a cause.

"In the first ten minutes of the consultation I said to her 'This is related to your daughter'. She said 'No, it's not. My daughter's happily married ..'. Half an hour later I said 'This is still related to your daughter'. 'No, there's nothing. We get on wonderfully well. Very happily married, everything's going wonderfully.' Again much later I said 'It is related to your daughter. Describe her husband to me' 'Oh, she's not married to a man, she married another woman', she replied. 'It's enough to give you the shits!' I said 'Did you hear what you just said?'."

The woman, Margaret inferred, had told herself so often that her daughter's lesbian relationship gave her the shits, that her physical body simply followed the plan and delivered.

The most important aspect of her work, Margaret says, is giving people options to let go of their illnesses, their problems and their hurts. "I'd say I spend most of my time in a reading dealing with the past and the present because once you've cleared up those two, the future is assured."

This work can get pretty complicated once you start to look at the dynamics between two or more people, in a personal relationship or, say, within a business structure.

"For example, three or four partners might have formed a business together because they all have experienced some loss in life that draws them together on a subconscious level. What you find is that the business will be held back because of their shared belief in loss. They'll go up several million, but they'll lose it again, and so it goes up and down until something changes. My job is to help them release their belief in loss so they can change their shared future through to successful business."

If Margaret is right, and one's past, present and future are largely the result of subconscious conditioning, we need to consider group dynamics from a different angle. Put simply, if Bob's subconscious conditioning has attracted him to Mary, and, by the same argument, Mary's conditioning has attracted her to Bob, what happens when one of them identifies a crucial block and releases it? What if that just happens to be the 'attracted to Mary' block that Bob has released? Suddenly the relationship is not as fulfilling for either of them and the future of the partnership is under question.

Margaret suggests family relationships often operate on such a delicate inter-connected web of blocks and reactions to other people’s blocks. One family, for example, might come to Margaret because the child seems to need help.

"I may find I don't need to work with the child but with the grandmother. The grandmother will release something from her life which releases the mother and that releases the child."

Projecting this idea forward, just how much effect might the release of one woman's block have, not only on her own future, but on the futures of all those people associated with her in one way or another? Is it really possible for Margaret to see the reverberating patterns of new futures and predict, for example, the appearance of the hitherto unknown South American husband, wedding ring in hand?

It emerges that Margaret's approach to problem solving is distinctly based on psychological theory. All things are possible, all people have all potential and all futures exist. All you have to do is make your choice and then release any subconscious blocks in your way. Her added appeal is that she demonstrates an ability to read your subconscious for you and identify the blocks that you, as an individual, cannot see. If her method is to predict outcomes through projecting a situation ahead, while her philosophy of life is one of total free will and choice, what can her insight offer our study of precognition?

For one, her ability to predict detailed future outcomes seems astonishing. It may be fairly logical, in theory, to predict general changes within a business structure or a personal relationship based on one individual's choice to release a subconscious block. To be able to do it with specific accuracy would be akin to predicting all possible ripple patterns generated by throwing a pebble into a pond, the surface of which is being constantly broken by the activity of a huge population of jumping fish and a crowd of another one hundred pebble throwers in the vicinity - and then selecting the pattern that will actually be seen by an observer from above. Has Margaret's brain developed this degree of pattern recognition? Or is her theory only partially right? Are our choices only apparent? Were Margaret's clients destined to go and consult her and release a certain block on a certain date all along? While Margaret may be able to see all combinations and permutations resulting from her clients' apparent choices, was the 'chosen' path always the only option, the choice itself an illusion? Is Margaret able to see a predestined future, despite the illusion of alternatives and choice?

There is an oft-quoted scientific principle known as Occam's Razor which, in every day language, states that the simplest theory is probably the correct one. It is easier for many people to explain a skill such as Margaret claims as an ability to see a fixed future or one of a limited range of alternative futures, than an ability to perform mathematical computations beyond the scope of present day computers.

I shifted the angle of my questioning to discover Margaret's view on the nature of time.

"It's only now. There's no time. I think there's a false linear time but overall there's only now. So if you could stand at the top of where time is, you'd be able to see past, present and future. You'd be able to see everything that's occurring everywhere in the one dimension, in the one time, yet going along the ground you're in what we call a linear time pace. It's as if you could look down on the world like an astronaut looks down on the world and sees all the things that are happening there, past, present and future are just all encapsulated in that one little ball."

Now this, of course, is the central paradox in my work, and one which will reappear in many forms and guises throughout this book until I pin it down. So I was eager to ask Margaret how she worked her view of 'no time' into her theory of choice and the ability of her clients to change their futures within that 'no time, one little ball' framework. As a seer of future detail and yet a believer in free will, could she reconcile these two modes of time?

"It's very hard to explain", she started. Her argument seemed to come down to the fact that people have a belief in linear time, so that is what she deals with when she's working with them. At the same time, Margaret noted that, on the little ball side of things, she's able to see a person's past lives, plus their present life right up to death, but never future lives. I noted that I'd never read or heard of anyone who claims to be able to predict future incarnations even though plenty of clairvoyants are happy making predictions about their clients' present lives. Surely, if past lives exist, then future lives should be predictable based on the little ball theory of no-time.

I took another tack and asked Margaret whether she ever had precognitive dreams.

"Yes. It's a funny sort of dream. It takes a strange shape. It's the feel more than the actual scene of the dream and when I get that, I know a relative is about to pass. It happened in 1964 and my brother died in 1965. He wasn't ill in 1964. It happened again in 1976 and my father died six months afterwards. Later I went to New Zealand and all of a sudden I got this same feeling and I tried to work out which relative, but it was a very dear friend who died while I was away. The dreams will start one day and continue until all of a sudden I can recognise who it is and then they stop. Although the dream stops, it doesn't mean I can change the outcome. I think they were warnings, because I was then able to handle the losses before they occurred."

I wondered what Margaret's views on precognitive dreams in general were.

"I tend to think precognitive dreams come to awaken people to the fact that they can tap into all knowledge if they want to. They usually get a terrific shock when the dream occurs. On the other hand, you get people who dream of an accident, particularly if it's for themselves, and then don't do anything about it, don't change anything in their life. They're being told 'This will occur unless you alter something,' and it's like saying 'Hey, wake up here, wake up! You can actually do something about this!' Then they just say 'Oh I dreamed the other night I had an accident and today I walked out and had an accident'. If I have a precognitive dream, I will immediately search and say 'Okay, is this definite, or what am I supposed to know about this to change it?"

The last sentence underlines, once again, the nod in the direction of destiny that all precognitive dreamers, visionaries and psychics make, regardless of how much argument they place in favour of total free will and choice. This is not intended as criticism. It is an observation. The unconscious speaks loud and clear in acknowledging the paradox of an intertwining free will/ destiny alongside an intertwining notion of linear time/ no time. Confusion, yet clarity.

Many psychics report the presence of a spirit guide or deceased family member who stands by during the reading, seen or unseen, delivering messages or adding the extra insight the psychic needs. I asked Margaret her views.

"I used to believe in guides because I'd have very specific ones who came in. I'd go through a certain way of working and a guide would be there and then he'd hand me over to another guide and then I'd work in a slightly different way. The last guide I had sat there leaning on a stick, looking forward and never acknowledged anything. I'm not sure now. I've never had a female figure, they've always been male, so I wonder whether we present a guide because we feel better when there's an authority figure around."

Whereas guides seem to be associated specifically with the clairvoyant, it seems the client often arrives with their own attendent spirits in tow. When it comes to spirits, in general, rather than specific guides who seem to act in long-term partnership with their psychic, Margaret has more confidence.

"I do have spirits who come in and will tell me different things when I'm working with a client. Now again, is that a projection of my knowledge so that I'm able to project the person? Has the client projected the image of the person who's died, which I can then see or hear, or has the person who died come in as the spirit? I see them as holograms, so I assume they are their spirit."

Apparently the spirit usually gives identifying information, often something that is known only to the client and is therefore believed to be a direct message from Spirit. Questions remain, of course, simply because the client does already know the information, and so could be projecting it for Margaret to tune into. The role of spirits, real or projectionary, in Margaret's readings seems to be that of healing the past, so the client can move forward into their future in a different way. In terms of the reading, the emotional release acts as a predictor of a future change.

I find this question of what the reader actually perceives interesting. My professional work with dreams has given me fluency with the symbolic language of the unconscious, or the right brain (for the purposes of this argument the language is similar, if not the same). Margaret states that she largely works with the subconscious and questions the validity of her visions of spirits as possibly being interpretations of her clients' perceptions. Do clairvoyants 'read' exactly what they pick up, in the direct language of symbolism, or do they interpret, much as I would interpret a dream into the language of the rational mind so that it is of more service to the dreamer in negotiating their waking world? To put it more simply let's turn to the folklore image of the gypsy woman gazing into her crystal ball.

The gypsy looks up and pronounces, 'You will travel over water and meet a handsome, dark stranger'. A dream of travelling over water and meeting a handsome dark stranger would be interpreted in terms of the dreamer's psyche and personal or spiritual development. Water in dreams tends to reflect the dreamer's emotions, whereas the male figure generally represents the dreamer's male side, (Jung's animus, the Chinese Yang, and the functions generally associated with the left brain). The union between the female dreamer and the dark stranger represents the union between her female side (anima, Yin, right brain qualities) and her male side. In dream terms, or in the language of the unconscious, the ultimate goal is recognition and union of the one integrated self: balance. So, looking back at the simplified dream, or reading, the unconscious is really expressing an understanding that integration with the woman's male side is best achieved by overcoming some emotional issues (travelling over water). The reason why the man is usually a dark stranger is that dark represents unknown, in the dark, and stranger is, of course, unknown aspects of the self. The question is, then, should the reader describe only what they 'see', or should they interpret what they see? How many psychics are capable of interpretation, and how many are ignorant of symbolism?

Another common expression of this, as I perceive it, is the death prediction. A person dreaming of death is usually dealing, at an unconscious level at least, with the symbolism of death of the old, birth of the new. The unconscious expresses the knowledge that the dreamer can transform his life by letting old beliefs and attitudes die to give way for the creation of new attitudes and a better life. Should the psychic, picking up the symbolic theme of death of the old, birth of the new from her client, or about her client, predict actual deaths or births, or should she interpret in terms of change for the better?

These arguments are based on Margaret's understanding that she is directly reading the subconscious. The case still exists that a psychic might preview an actual future death or birth, in the same way that precognitive dreams emerge occasionally among the symbolic ones, in which case the ethics change. I asked Margaret for her view.

"I pick up an awful lot of clients who've been told 'Oh, there's a terrible event coming towards you'. They phone me and say 'Now I'm scared witless'. I say 'Look, don't worry. All it is, is you're letting go of the old and moving on to the new. You need to look beyond that transition, beyond that watershed and you'll see everything's going to be fine. You may lose your business or go through a divorce, but it's only going to happen if you want the changes. If you don't want them, it's showing you to make changes so you don't have to go through it'. But some readers stop at the point where they see disaster and it frightens people."

Margaret says she presents both views.

"When a person comes to me for a reading they get exactly what I see. If I see water, I'll say 'I see muddy, eddying water. Normally emotion shows up as water and muddy water means murky emotions you haven't sorted out, or you haven't got clear'. Or if it's a waterfall, 'There's some big change coming, some emotional or physical change. You have to interpret it according to what hits strongly for you. I can tell you what it may be and we can explore that.' Or, with some people I can not only see the water but also clearly see what it represents. "

Taking a break from analysis and ethics, I asked Margaret which readings have given her the greatest joy.

"Seeing a retarded boy come right, seeing people who've got really horrible illnesses or deformities straighten through releasing blocks, seeing people who are going broke turning business around," she listed. "I had a guy who was on blood transfusions, dying of cancer. He wanted to see me. The doctor said 'You won't live twenty-four hours, so yes, you can go and see her'. He reached an understanding of why he had the cancer and made changes to release and forgive things that he'd done. This change gave him time, another four and a half months to be exact, to put everything in order before he died.

In another case I had one fourteen-year-old who couldn't read. I helped him to release one or two emotions and twenty minutes later he was on the phone to his mother, sobbing 'I can read!'. All I'd done was release the emotions. I cry with them, it's just magic. I wouldn't swap this job for anything."

Margaret summarises her understanding of life, "We live, we choose for ourselves, we die, we go into spirit and we choose for ourselves whether we're going to remain in spirit or incarnate." Alongside all this choice, she also says she occasionally tunes in to a person's life purpose.

"Very occasionally I have been able to stand up there on that time where you see all time and say to a client, 'You're going through this, but this is what your life purpose is. If you go ahead with your plan, then in ten years time you're going to change job and then you're going to be sacked. It's out of your hands. It's a change that's going to force you back on the path of your life purpose. So if you want to fulfil your life purpose and avoid all that, let's make the changes now."

Margaret's argument implies that it's not so much a matter of choosing whether or not to accept your life purpose, but of choosing when to accept it. The unseen forces, it appears, will ultimately put us on the right path one way or another. Choice? What choice? Is there really choice at the end of the day, or when viewed from the 'no time, one little ball framework'? The very essence of the word purpose implies an ultimate destiny: tick the right box, take the right action, fulfil your destiny and win the prize!

I drove away from Margaret's home pondering the subtleties and uncertainties of human perception. Occam's Razor flashed again before my eyes, as I wrote the final lines of this story in my mind.

Not only do we have the paradox of coexisting no time and linear time, but also the shadow of a paradox of choice coexisting with destiny. Perhaps the unifying solution, in philosophical terms, is that no time, linear time, choice and destiny are all but illusions of a greater phenomenon as yet unnamed by human intellect.

The Reverend Ruth Bennett seemed so fragile as she sat surrounded by her dogs and cats, contemplating me silently. I was experiencing one of those low-tech days when simple electronic machines such as tape recorders suddenly seem unfathomable. You know, those days when you feel a real idiot because your intellectual mind is racing ahead with questions, leaving the mechanical mind far behind. I stared alternately at the line of holes punched in the plastic casing and the wires in my hand and wondered how long it would be before I would remember where to stick what. I fumbled all the more when I noticed that Ruth kept watching a spot slightly to the left of my body, and I began to wonder what kind of entity might be looking over my shoulder. I pushed the wire into another hole to no avail, and hoped Ruth would deliver a message from Spirit to help. Instead, or perhaps in answer to my thoughts, her son entered the room and did the male mechanical thing for me. It was strange, though, because the whole tape recording was muffled and buzzy and very difficult to transcribe.

As minister of a Spiritualist Church in Queensland, Ruth, who has a diploma in education and used to be a primary school teacher, holds a religious celebrants' licence and conducts regular church services. Unlike the other clairvoyants I interviewed, Ruth is aware that it is still illegal for lay people to receive pay for doing readings in Queensland. Her situation, however, is different. "As a Minister of Religion I am legally entitled to do counselling and to give advice, and I don't infringe the law by doing readings." In careful consideration of the law as it now stands, Ruth also employs a number of psychic readers at her Tea Room. The long standing Tea Room tradition allows people to buy afternoon tea at a price which includes a 'free' reading. As long as the readers are not seen to accept money for their services, the whole operation is above board.

Between running the Tea Room, carrying out the duties of a minister of religion, and offering private readings at home, Ruth also teaches a Mind Dynamics course. One semester she shared the results of a dream experiment with her students.

"I started experimenting with seeing if I could dream the future, and I thought that horse races would be a good way to go because you get pretty quick proof of those. On a Tuesday night I used to put a programme in before I went to sleep that I would dream the winner of the race the following day which was Wednesday. I had, by this stage, a pretty well-developed sense of remembering my dreams and interpreting them, so I would work out which one had the horse race winner picture and then I'd look through the papers and see which horse fitted the dream. It checked out every day for about seven or eight mornings. One night I was telling this to a group of students and one said 'Well, will you ring me up on Wednesday morning and give me the winner?', which defeated the purpose. If we were to use it just to make money it wouldn't work. What I was trying to prove was that you can dream the future by conscious desire."

Ruth says everyone has the ability to look into the future but some people are better 'instruments' than others.

"I was aware of my clairvoyant, clairaudient and clairsentient abilities back in the early sixties, thirty odd years ago. The other stuff, the body scanning with X-Ray vision for example, I developed through practice on the Mind Dynamics course. As far as readings on a one-to-one basis went, the more I did, the better I became. So I guess it's like learning the piano, the more practice you get, the better you are at it."

Ruth has been charging a very modest fee for her personal readings for the last five years or so, although she had been reading for Spiritualist churches for free since 1982. I asked her to define the basis of the Spiritualist movement.

"The Spiritualist Church has no set dogma or doctrine," she replied. "They have a set of seven principles and basically they encourage people to think and to reason and research and accept what seems right. One person's truth isn't another person's truth."

Despite her interest in the Spiritualist movement, Ruth usually rules spiritual guidance out of her readings.

"I feel you don't need to see a reader for that. The readings I do are sorting out everyday problems such as relationships, jobs, money and health. I look into future situations mainly to take action on them before they happen, advising the need to consult your doctor or have your car checked out by a mechanic. I tend not to get into spiritual guidance unless I see a need. Most people who come for readings aren't looking for that anyway."

Ruth described how she warned one woman to watch her purse and cancel her plastic cards.

"Later the woman left a considerable sum of money back at home when she took her kids on an access visit to her husband. While at his house her purse was taken. She thought he was responsible and that he was after the plastic cards because he knew all the pin numbers. But it was too late. She had heeded the warning and changed banks!"

On another occasion Ruth insisted that a woman should check herself in for a cancer smear test because she saw, through body scanning, the early stages of cancer.

"I said, 'You get your butt down to a gynaecologist and get a smear test'", Ruth recalled, "She said 'Is it that bad?' and I said 'Yes, it's up to you, but my clairvoyance has got a good track record and this doctor of mine that comes through is saying it's urgent, so get your butt down, like yesterday'. So she took my advice and went down the next day and the doctor put her into hospital, the smear test having confirmed the psychic diagnosis. A few days later her two daughters came back to thank me for saving their mum's life."

I understood body scanning was a Mind Dynamics technique enabling the reader to see or envision the body's physical organs, but I was intrigued by Ruth's description of  'this doctor of mine that comes through'. Which doctor?, I asked.

"I feel I have a doctor there that's passed over, a spirit contact, helper, or whatever you want to call it, who is giving me the information, but who knows? I know I'm trained to pick up on medical problems through telepathy, but I tend not to know some of the terms. If I start talking about endocrine glands or things like that, which I haven't had any training on, then I know I've got to be getting it from somewhere. Maybe I'm mentally scanning a medical textbook or just accessing it from universal knowledge. Or maybe I'm I getting it from a specific person who was a doctor. It's a million dollar question that I don't know that anyone can answer."

While she was in philosophising mode, I asked Ruth how she saw time.

"The jury's still out on that one," she laughed. "I have a really active mind and I play with these concepts. I don't know if time's something we move through. I don't know if everything exists all at once and we merely move through experiences. I know time and space are connected and that we can't separate them, so I wonder whether somewhere Christopher Columbus is still sailing to America and I'm in a different place. Is time a case of action, you know, this action takes place then that action takes place and we call the sequence 'time', or does everything exist all at once? I don't know. All I know is that I don't have any barriers to seeing something of the future, present or the past."

She paused for a while and then summarised.

"At the clairvoyant level time doesn't exist. I just see things and if the client's good I can get a bit of guidance on whether it has happened, it is happening or it’s going to happen. I think time is what man has devised in order to cope with life."

In the linear time versus no time debate, it seemed Ruth leaned in favour of no time with linear time as a false but necessary perceptual tool for negotiating life as it appears to be.

So how did she see the future: as a fixed destiny, as partially changeable, or totally at the mercy of individual free will?

"I liken it to watching kids playing cricket in the back yard. I'm looking out the window and I see a ball heading towards me. I've got three options: I can let the ball hit the window. I can open the window and let the ball come through, or, if I'm downstairs, I could catch the ball or put the garbage bin lid up to intercept it".

She answered, neatly illustrating all the variables I'd mentioned. Fragile in body she might be, but Ruth demonstrated a strong, quick draw-mind when it came to finding the right analogy. Perhaps, I thought, this is why she is drawn to tarot cards which are pictorial metaphors for archetypal situations in life. The theory is that the right cards come out in a reading in the right order according to what needs to be known.

"If I'm working on the church platform I don't use tarot cards, but when I read from the Tea Room or at home I use them to speed the reading up," Ruth confirms. "I can also involve the person I'm reading for, because you can point things out and the cards help them to memorise. If you want to come back to a point, or you want to refer back to something you've already said, the cards are there, so you've got instantaneous referral."

It's all too easy for anxious clients to believe in a fixed future, firmly sealed by a clairvoyant's spoken words and encoded onto audio tape for later reinforcement. Ruth advocates the need to educate people about their power to take action and change their future:

"I tell everyone, 'The future's never fixed. What you decide now, or what action you take now, what you do and what you think now, will set your future.' If someone says, 'You've brought a jinx on me,' I say, 'No, I'm only seeing something. You have free will. Your mind is supreme. So just because I see it, it doesn't mean it's got to happen. What I'm seeing will happen if you do nothing to change it'. So I never leave myself open for somebody to come back and say, 'After what you said, I decided there's nothing left in life for me,' or anything like that. If they're writing it down, or I'm taping it, I make sure I say very specifically that the future is never fixed, and that they can do something about it before it happens."

What line does she take if she sees death? Does she see death in a reading as a literal preview or warning of an actual death, or as symbolic of her client's unconscious readiness for rebirth through death of the old, birth of the new? Ruth's answer sidesteps the question of symbolism for the moment.

"I use my discretion. I tend to put it in such a way that I let them down gently and then I always say, 'Well the future's never fixed', or 'A clairvoyant could be wrong'. Any death that I've seen is usually an older person, where their body is so far gone that it's just a matter of time, and I usually say something like, 'Well, you realise your mum hasn't got that much longer to go, you might have her for Christmas, so send some white light'. If I feel that it's imminent, I'll say, 'Well, just send her lots of love and realise that she's chosen the time to go'. I very rarely see an accident or anything like that and I don't know that it's my privilege as a reader to do so. If I pick up an illness I tell it like it is so they can go and get treatment."

I returned to the question of symbolism and asked Ruth whether, apart from the symbolism of the tarot, she noticed other symbols coming into her readings.

"I am of the opinion that each clairvoyant has his or her own symbols. If I see shark's teeth, that's shorthand for saying 'Watch out - somebody's out to get you'. If I see an umbrella over somebody's head, that's 'protection from spirit' . If I see an elephant I say, 'You're going to be getting a lot of help in a situation'."

I wondered how Ruth could tell the difference between her own symbolism and that of her client.

"It can be specific. I was reading for someone once and I saw champagne corks popping. I got someone from Spirit saying 'But be careful not to shake the champagne up: don't shake the bottle before you pop the cork!' I thought, 'How am I going to interpret this?' I told her all this as I was going and I said, 'If you shake the bottle up, when the cork comes off, some of the champagne's going to go onto the carpet, or onto whatever, and you're not going to have the whole full bottle of champagne. Why not have the whole bottle?' Then I went into the physical interpretation: you could sell your house now, but at the moment it's a buyers' market, so if you wait until it's a sellers' market, then you're going to have the whole bottle of champagne.' Sometimes you've got to take a little bit of time to get that interpretation and that's where I feel a more intelligent person is just a little bit better at interpreting a symbol. Some clairvoyants just shoot their heads off, as if they're off with the fairies, saying 'Next year's going to be a good year because I can see champagne corks popping!'"

Plunging back into the more universal symbolism of the unconscious, as discussed in Margaret's story, I asked Ruth whether the popular old 'You'll travel across water and meet a handsome dark stranger' prediction was a case of delivering straight dreamlike symbolism without responsible interpretation.

"It could be, yes. I don't tend to get into that esoteric type of reading, I tend to get nuts and bolts. If I've seen milk being spilt, I don't say that straight away. I'll say 'Watch that you don't shoot your mouth off' or 'Watch what you say'. Then I'll come back and say 'Because I'm seeing milk being spilt and you won't be able to take your words back'. So I always give them the interpretation first, rather than come out straight with the symbol because that's very confusing. I always give them the symbolism as well, though, because I feel its easier for them to retain the words. On the other hand, I might be shown a particular flower and I've got to interpret it, so I ask: 'Can you tell me anything about a really dark, red rose that's nearly black?' Often they'll say something like, 'Yes, my husband used to grow them. That's his favourite rose'."

'Best clairvoyants in Brisbane: Best Tea Room', boasts Ruth's advert. With years of experience of hiring and firing readers, I wondered if she had identified any personality traits associated with being a good psychic.

"The best, especially those that are very good at channelling as well as telepathy, are typically earthy types, often uneducated. Some highly educated people with university degrees are good psychics, but generally the intellect is a barrier for many people because they focus on intellect at the expense of instinct or intuition. Musicians, painters, architects and inventors, who rely on inspiration for their creativity, often make good clairvoyants though."

Since Ruth believes that psychic skills can be improved through practise, she offers advice and training for new readers starting out in her Tea Room.

"It's important to put your own desires or hobby horses aside and make sure that you're not reading your own wishes or pushing your own wheelbarrow. I have seen readers who are incurable romantics, saying, 'Oh you're going to get married soon, I can see this lovely man coming along, you're going to have this beautiful white wedding dress,' to every unmarried woman. Other readers always seem to pick up on parental things, asking 'What sort of relationship did your parents have?', because their own parents had a problem they haven't come to grips with yet. Another one might have been a victim of incest and keep seeing the same issue coming up in her readings. I remind my students 'There are plenty of people coming for readings who are happily married and they're just coming for a little look-see into the future. Not everyone has tragic circumstances'."

Hands-on training comes in the shape of dummy runs or observation on the job.

"I do pretend readings for my new readers, so they get the idea of the type of circumstances I cover and how I phrase things. Alternatively I'll get them to sit near another Tea Room reader and listen in, to get an idea of what the primary focuses are, what's eating away at most people and what's driving them to book a consultation. Coming from a teaching background I'm used to training teachers with the philosophy: 'You watch how I teach, then you get up and do that'."

I had just witnessed the pragmatic face of both Spiritualism and clairvoyancy and yet something was still missing. I switched off my tape recorder, took my farewells and walked to the car, focussing on the mechanical intricacies of a triple reverse turn. How often did my intellect get in the way, not only of mastering mechanical skills, but also of grasping the true nature of precognition?

"I welcome this opportunity to give thanks today to saints and sages of all religions. May we humbly bow before you all, for lighting the lamp of freedom that we may now more clearly see our way to where we need to be. I ask that wherever you go in life, would you please continue to keep much peace in your eyes and great love in your heart. Allow the spiritual healing essence of who you know yourself to be to overspill out, to enrich and uplift all others, including yourself, as you aspire upon your journey to divine prosperity. And with this I would like to bless you with the blessing 'Sai Ram'. I salute the highest divinity within you. May God bless you. Go forth."

Saanthi sat back in her reading chair and smiled. Behind her hung a framed code of ethics, and on another shelf I could see a pile of feedback questionnaires. New blank audio tapes were stacked high beside them, as Saanthi insists that her readings are recorded for her clients to check through in the months to come. Outside her main street shop the sun was bright, but here, tucked away in her reading room, we were cosseted in surreal new age ambience. I had just asked Saanthi if she had a special routine to help her establish the right bonding for a reading and to mark the start and finish of her work. She had leaned across the table, held my hand and entranced me with the whole ritual: everything bar an actual reading. The opening paragraph is Saanthi's closing ritual, whereupon the reader-client transaction is complete.

Saanthi is a spiritual name acquired 'through Spirit' many years ago.It means River of Divine Peace. It's an apt name. Saanthi flows. She speaks quickly, using long sentences which tumble into each other, making transcription of our taped interview a nightmare. She uses flowery language, honeyed with phrases like 'I sought to discover', 'Do not go beyond where you haven't yet begun' and 'I determine and discern' that seem more fitting of ancient times. Well known as a reader who communicates with Spirit, I wondered who was really doing most of the speaking that day. "If I say it quickly," Saanthi explained, "it’s too clever for me, so it has to be channelled from a higher entity." It's an indemnity based on Saanthi's trust in the world of Spirit after an agonising self-questioning period earlier in her career.

Saanthi's awakening to her psychic abilities occurred when she was sixteen years old.

Raised to share the farm work on her parents' property, she would often sneak away from tracking cattle to spend time with her grandmother who lived across the creek. Saanthi would exchange a billy of milk for a boiled lolly and her grandmother's memories of the past or stories of the country folk. Years later, returning to visit to her grandmother, she found the creek had risen to a raging river. The old lady stood and watched her safely negotiate the water.

"My last living memory of my grandmother was that she was standing beside this beautiful blooming cactus, waving a white gentleman's hankie to me as I went off. There was something very deep in my heart there and then that said 'You may not see your grandmother again'."

One morning a few months later, Saanthi awoke around five to prepare for a journey. She lay in bed for a while, waiting for her husband to finish his shower, savouring her last moments.

"I was very much awake when an apparition of my grandmother appeared to me with her arms outstretched. I was quite horrified because I knew she was still alive."

At first Saanthi thought it was some kind of omen, warning them to take care on their long drive into Brisbane, but her anxiety grew and she phoned her sister and asked her to go over and check on her grandmother. She heard herself adding, "'Please go, because I feel there's only six weeks around her to live, or six weeks around me, and I don't understand this!"

Later that day they learned what had happened. Her grandmother had torn her skin in her rose garden weeks beforehand and the wound had become ulcerated. "At some time between me seeing the apparition and eight o'clock that morning, she had collapsed. She died of pancreatic cancer six weeks later."

This was Saanthi's first frightening experience of her abilities not only to tune into someone else through telepathy, but also to witness an apparition and to accurately predict a time of death. Today she is more comfortable in acknowledging her skills, defining herself as a 'sensitive'. She also practices as a healer and a shaman.

Nowadays many of Saanthi's readings include messages from Spirit or from her clients' deceased relatives or friends.

"Often when the client walks into the room I know on a vibrational level that someone [deceased] is there. I don't always mention it, but if there's a reason why they need to communicate, I'll share it with them."

She often gives accurate descriptions of time and relevant phrases which identify the deceased, or reference to knowledge shared only between the deceased and the client. Saanthi is confident that she is indeed sensitive to the departed spirits, although it could equally be argued that she is sensitive to the memories of the deceased in her clients' minds, including turns of phrase or confidential knowledge.

Messages delivered in this way usually relate to past or present circumstances, or are advice about the future from the deceased, so this area of Saanthi's work is not directly relevant to the question of precognition. However, Saanthi is certain that she receives much of her information in readings, including future-specific information, directly from specialised guides, from Spirit. Once, when she felt the need to translate a message to make it clearer, she heard her guide,

"state quite belligerently: 'Listen, Saanthi. We guides from the collective unconscious authorise you as courier to deliver the parcel but not to unwrap and rewrap it to how you interpret it should have been wrapped! Would you just present the parcel.' "

Accepting responsibility as a reader is a key issue, as Saanthi sees it. "I believe that everyone has the gift but I believe some people choose not to want to identify with it". Two major experiences earlier in her career prompted her to re-evaluate her role as a reader and question the forces which determine an individual's future. Strangely, both experiences were of aborted readings: readings which, as far as Saanthi was concerned at the time, were not working.

"I had a lady come to me many years ago saying, 'Oh hello, Saanthi, I've been told you do really lovely readings, and I'm all excited, I'm really looking forward to this. This is wonderful'. She was outgoing, she was a joy. I thought, 'What a treasure! This lady's going to be so easy, so happy with her reading'. I did everything that was necessary including the process to attune to guides to begin the reading. But in vain. There was no response. I looked at the cards. I couldn't remember or relate to them. They were just pieces of paper. I looked down and tapped my watch, and I said 'I do need to apologise. I just feel I'm not in tune today. They've pulled the plug'. For all intents and purposes she probably thought, 'This is a set up'. I kept focussing on my watch and she said, 'What's wrong with your watch?' I said 'It's stopped, it's got the wrong time.' I went on like this for some minutes and nothing happened. I concluded this time to be unsuitable for a reading for anyone. She went away and two days later I found out she had suicided."

Saanthi discovered that the woman had made suicide attempts before and told a close friend she was going to do it again. The friend, who had previously received a good and helpful reading with Saanthi, pleaded with her suicidal friend: 'Just do one thing. Go and see Saanthi and then make up your own mind because I can't feel responsible for what you do.'

After the suicide, the friend called Saanthi and revealed that the woman had gone to the reading looking for a sign. When the watch stopped she believed she had received her answer.

"I was very shook up about that. I just went into fear mode. I had gone out there to help people", Saanthi explained. She spoke with a psychologist who regularly dealt with suicidal people and had come to terms with some of them succeeding in their quest, despite his counselling.

"He advised me to keep doing my work and suggested a more challenging approach if I found myself reading for someone with suicidal wishes in the future. His idea was to confront the person and challenge them to consider the feelings of loved ones who may find them in the event of their intentions being carried out."

Not only had Saanthi been emotionally shaken by this event, but it also served to force her to face one of her most treasured beliefs. "It was very difficult because I believe that energy follows thought and I wondered how much I created that situation." A second experience, earlier in her reading life, had caused the same self-questioning.

A woman came to see Saanthi back in the days when she was working from home on a word of mouth basis. It was not an easy time. Saanthi had three small children and was recovering from an accident with a patch over her injured eye when the woman unexpectedly appeared for a consultation. "I received the message that the woman was pregnant," Saanthi said, "but although I attempted the reading three times, nothing further was coming through." Feeling the pain of her bruised eye and acknowledging her exhaustion, she thought, 'Right, they've taken my energy away because they want me to be on sabbatical. They want me to restore and regenerate before assisting anyone else'. But the woman was still insistent. After trying again, Saanthi placed her hand on the woman's shoulder to apologise when she heard a voice say, 'Tell her about how your son, was born'.

Now, Saanthi's second child was born with lung disease and was retrieved after his lungs collapsed twice. Saanthi turned to the woman at the last moment and said, 'My guide has just told me to tell you a story about my son'. Saanthi's story led to an impromptu reading.

"I told the woman, 'You're pregnant, did you know you're pregnant?'. 'No', she replied. 'Well, listen', I continued, I'm not prepared to put any of this on tape, so this is a sharing, not a reading, but I was given the impression that you're going to have a boy child who's going to be born in approximately six months. He's going to need to be retrieved and will be ushered to a neonatal centre. If you have any pain you must go to the doctor, because for some reason you will be eating chicken and around eight-thirty or nine I see you being admitted to the hospital. Your girlfriend will see that you get to hospital'. "

The woman turned to her friend who had accompanied her to Saanthi's house.

"And she said 'Well, we live in Brisbane and my friends live in Bli Bli, so there's not much chance of that happening. We don't get together that much. But anyway, why not my husband? I've got a husband, you know'. I said, 'Because he'll be drunk. I'm sorry, you think I'm making it up as I go along, but I'm telling you that he's drunk."

Many months later Saanthi received a bouquet of flowers with a message: 'Thank you very much for saving the life of my son'.

"It happened exactly as I had described", Saanti continued. "The girlfriend and her husband had been helping them to move house and by eight, eight-thirty that evening the men went out to buy some food and have a beer. They didn't normally drink, but on this occasion they had three or four. So the girlfriend ended up driving her into hospital that night."

Although Saanthi had delivered accurate details of future events to previous clients, it was the similarity of the two birth circumstances that raised a note of alarm. "I wondered whether I created it because I sowed the seed of thought. I gave her the whole scenario."

So now, many years later, what does Saanthi understand about the nature of the future?

"I'd say I predict probable futures. There are people who take responsibility for their actions and choose to do something about their life and there are others who choose to allow the Universal Will to lead and take them where it may. In some way I feel that there is a position of fate available to us, but as we sow so we shall reap, so we are creating our future based on association of previous memories, experiences, or the experiences of other people."

Saanthi seems to be describing a mix of free will and fixed destiny which determines our individual futures: perhaps with different ratio mixes for different people. As a psychic reader she chooses the role of facilitator - someone who can highlight the probable options - leaving the decisions of active choice or passive unfolding to her clients. Using a metaphor to get her message across in her readings, she explains,

"You are in full control of your life. You are master of the reading. You are master of your own destiny. I'm purely in here as a navigator. I am in the passenger seat, darling, you're in the driver's seat. Let's see how fast and how far we can go'."

Saanthi's solution to the paradox of the nature of time is simple. The question is not so much one of linear time versus no time, but a melding of the two - and yet neither: "Time is irrelevant. We have to live it now, in this moment. This is time. Time is now. This is the only moment."

"There's a psychic about to be interviewed on ABC radio, Jane," Glen announced as he brought me a cup of coffee. "He's just written a book and he's going to do talkback too." I was sitting at my desk ploughing through the precognitive dreaming questionnaire replies at the time. I had already drawn up a shortlist of clairvoyants to interview for this book and had heard radio psychics before, but I thought I'd listen in anyway. According to the radio promo, Bruce Way had a twenty-year background in business management and computers and had just had his second book, How To Interpret A Psychic Reading, published.

The talkback section was predictable, at least as far as the callers' questions were concerned. 'When will our house be sold?', 'Will I marry the man in my life?' and 'Will I get a promotion at work?' jostled alongside the inevitable cynicism, complete with disguised voice, asking 'What can you tell about me?' Somewhere between callers Bruce managed to squeeze in a few lines about his book; just enough to get me interested. Finally the radio presenter asked for a personal prediction. Cutbacks had been announced for the ABC and jobs were at stake, but at that time, no one knew who would stay and who would go. The presenter brushed off Bruce's 'Do you really want me to tell you on air?' retort, and insisted. Bruce told him that he wouldn't lose his job in the first round and that a new opportunity would be presented to him mid 1997. The choice as to whether to stay with the ABC or to leave would then be his. At that point I decided to invite Bruce to be featured in my book whether the prediction turned out to be accurate or not. As far as I was concerned, anyone who had the guts to make a precise on-air prediction for a man in the public eye had to have the power of conviction behind him. It was that conviction that interested me. The presenter? He did survive the first round of cuts, unlike several of his peers, and mid 1998, is still there.

Bruce's radio interview and predictions were made over the phone from his Sydney home, distinguishing him as a distance reader, which added to my interest. I left a message with his publisher and Bruce was on the line before the day had ended. Resisting the urge to ask him about the future success of this book, I outlined the project and he agreed to be interviewed. I guess that was an endorsement in its own way!

"I read distantly ninety per cent of the time now because I am not as distracted and I believe it gives more evidence of proof." Bruce's insistence on proof reflects his own journey of discovery, from his Seventh-Day Adventist origins to the establishment of his busy career as a clairvoyant and trance medium. "Also I can put more information into thirty minutes distantly than in a sixty minute face to face", Bruce Way the business management expert added!

"I am forty-five-years old now. I realised I 'had something' when I was about thirty-six. Before that, no idea. Most probably because anything psychic scared me." Bruce's Adventist background had taught that psychics had a direct line to the Devil, but by the time a friend booked him a psychic reading for a birthday present, he was committed to following his curiosity rather than his religion. He endured a battle to begin with, tossing the taped reading into the bin, only to regret it later when several of the things the psychic had predicted came about. His early religious conditioning soon gave way to the testing sceptic. For several years Bruce consulted three psychics every six months, comparing every detail of their readings. In two cases Bruce would sit quietly and give no feedback until the end of each reading. His third psychic was a distance reader, which satisfied the sceptic. He finally concluded that eighty per cent of each of the readings cross-matched. The sceptic shifted ground.

In the meantime Bruce had experimented.

"I used to give impromptu readings to friends, just telling them about themselves, with stunning accuracy. I would also get flashes of world events about to happen and seem to be able to get advice out of nowhere."

On one occasion, he was travelling in a car with friends, enjoying the general conversation, when he felt himself slip into a silence.

"The world stopped momentarily and I saw a city shaken by an earthquake. The experience lasted for a few seconds and then normality returned. In shock I turned to my friends and said, 'You're not going to believe this but Newcastle will be hit by an earthquake in two days.' After that remark the ensuing silence was real. My friends looked at me as if I was crazy and, stunned by what I had just said, I was ready to believe them."

Two days later, the Newcastle earthquake shocked Australians, who were unaccustomed to such damaging quakes.

Bruce has been working full-time as a clairvoyant for six years now and also teaches others how to develop their natural intuitive and psychic talents. With two books to his name and a strong media profile, he is considered an expert in his field. "My healing ability came first, then clairsentience, then clairvoyance. The cap was trance medium ship which was studied for in earnest." As a trance medium, Bruce delivers information directly from a spirit guide or spiritual source. He defines spirit guides as 'earth's graduating class', being, in his opinion, souls who have learned their earthly lessons and who take on the task of helping us to get through school too. Their ultimate goal is to reconnect us with the divine creative source, or, as Bruce likes to express it, they 'act as the introduction agency to God'.

The following passage from his book, How To Interpret a Psychic Reading, is an example of one of Bruce's psychic deliverances on the purpose of life. It clearly states his position on the free will versus fixed destiny question.

"It is said by some that before we are born we plan out all the events, circumstances and people to meet that will give us the ideal environment for our learning. We then become human and in the process selectively forget about the plan. On this blueprint we arrange to meet certain people at certain times in our lives to experience certain things. Usually these times are conditional on us reaching specific stages of personal development. Psychics can predict the future because they can access the information source relating to the blueprint."

In other words, Bruce sees a preplanned destiny which can be overridden by free will. We may, in Bruce's view, have fixed a date with destiny to experience an aspect of life we need to understand, but if we are not ready for the lesson, or if we have been an ace student and already got the message, we need not turn up. By accessing the blueprint, the psychic is therefore, according to Bruce, reading the original projected plan, which may or may not eventuate.

While the psychic has access to life's blueprint, he does not have to wade through the plans himself. Bruce's method is to be the intermediary, having a spirit or spirit guide consult the information and sift out what the client needs to know. The psychic, Bruce in this case, tunes in to the spirit and simply passes on the messages:

"I don't read people. I communicate what Spirit wants me to give them. Therefore my connection is with my guides not with the person. My most accurate skill is tuning into my guides. They do the rest."

The role of a spirit guide is to introduce the client to the "destiny of your choosing, without interfering in the process of individual choice."

As an example, Bruce tells the story in his book of a reading he did for a couple, Sue and Owen, in 1994. He opened the reading with the message, 'Well, I hope you like the United States of America because I can see you living there ...'. The couple were delighted, as this was one of their greatest wishes. Six months later, Sue rang Bruce:

"She was very disgruntled! 'We are still in Australia. Have you ever been wrong before?!' Dumbfounded, I muttered something and she continued, 'My husband and I were so confident in your reading that we even cancelled the order for our new furniture.' The penny dropped. I explained to her that she and her husband were the missing ingredients. They had stopped living and were waiting for nirvana - two airline tickets to California."

The point was that Sue and Owen were on course for their 'date with destiny', but because they went home and changed things in readiness for the predicted move, they missed out on the chain of events which would otherwise have led them there. Bruce advised them to forget about the original prediction and get on with life for the next six months. This was the length of time they had steered off course so Bruce estimated it would also be the length of time needed to make up the distance. Naturally the story had a happy ending. Owen rang Bruce this time.

"He rang to tell me they were at the airport waiting for their flight to Los Angeles. It transpired that his employer offered him the same promotion that he rejected after the reading because he thought he was going to America. This time he took it. Within weeks, personnel advised him that this position was redundant and that a similar position was vacant in America. Did he want to go?!"

It's important to point out here that Bruce's readings, in his estimation, are derived from two sources.

"About fifty per cent is from my guides, while the other fifty per cent is based on intuition, which is, when we think about it, both coming from the same source - God."

In other words, guides bring outside information, such as blueprint details, while the reader's intuition brings inner knowledge from "the perfect self within". Bruce's experience of God is the all-encompassing whole that feeds both sources.

Now I was beginning to understand Bruce's air of conviction and confidence in his radio predictions. His messages are God-given, but it is up to the client to decide whether or not to act on the information or to allow the foreseen future to unfold. Consequently his predictions are possible or likely outcomes, but his faith in their source is one hundred per cent firm.

In his book, Bruce describes his connection with God.

"When I give a reading I know when some information is about to come through me because I am filled with the most beautiful sense of peace. .. This euphoric sensation I believe is evidence of God."

I asked Bruce where his responsibilities lay.

"I believe that what I am given must be transmitted, so I read on the understanding that Spirit will make its decision. I am just the vehicle not the evaluator of the information. I 'give what I get' so I usually don't see the whole picture. It is none of my business anyway to know the nitty-gritty details. If I am having difficulty in interpreting the information then quite often I am given a much broader look at the situation so that I can put it into context for the client."

His vision, then, is one of identifying, by God-given psychic or intuitive means, the future potential of his clients, and then encouraging them to take appropriate actions to fulfil that potential. The necessary action may be simply to stay on course or it may be to consider an alternative path. Either way, the client is the one who needs to make the choices and take responsibility for his or her future. Bruce sees "inspiring people to find their own creative genius" as the most important part of his work. The down side rears its head "every time a person will not accept responsibility for their lives and expect me to do it for them."

Putting Bruce's view into my metaphor, he perceives a world where we each carry a road map, or blueprint, with a preselected route marked in invisible ink. Before birth we chose the ideal route to bring us our much needed lessons of life and nominated the co-voyagers we would meet along the way. Once born we carry the map around knowing we have the freedom to travel any path, but somehow sensing that life is a game, the object of which is to find the right path to bring us, via destiny, to a sense of God. We visit psychics searching for the magic eye that can see the inked route invisible to our own eyes. If only we could get on the right path, everything would be fine! Enter the paradox: the psychic may well possess the inner eye and may describe the right road and how to get on it, but you, the client, must take responsibility and make a choice based on free will before destiny becomes a reality. The ultimate lesson of life is taking responsibility for our thoughts and actions via choice.

Now Bruce's theory requires certain aspects of our road map to be in place. We may choose whether or not to join a church, go to university or take part in a protest march, but, if these are critical points in our individual life journey, then the church, the university and the protest march need to exist regardless of our choice to be on the same grid reference or not. On a simple level, this fits neatly with Bruce's observation that "world or major events that are not personal always seem to be fixed. Otherwise any scenario is changeable if on a personal level."

World disasters are a case in point. Bruce has predicted large scale events, such as the Newcastle earthquake earlier in this story. He believes the sole purpose of predicting a disaster is to warn people so that they can choose to avoid it or, where possible, take action to avoid the disaster happening. An air crash may be predicted, for example, but the forewarned can choose to take another plane or to warn the airline company to check the plane or cancel the flight. If Bruce's initial observation is correct, though, and impersonal events always seem to be fixed, the only real option would be to take another plane. This is where the theory gets murky! World events encompass people: a decision to declare war or launch a nuclear bomb is made by a person, or a collection of people, and it is the destruction of human lives that turns a natural event such as a volcanic eruption into a disaster. Where does the 'changeable personal level' end and where do the 'fixed world or major events' begin? On the blueprint map level, the church, the university and the protest march were envisioned, built or organised by people, so they are the outcome of the changeable personal level. Through such argument the borderline between the changeable and the fixed becomes blurred. Unless, of course, free will and choice is an illusion, and we were always destined to follow the original blueprint, always destined to make the choices which fulfil the grand fixed plan.

Perhaps Bruce's understanding of the nature of time would solve this paradox. I asked him how he saw time. "I wish I knew. This one I have never been able to fathom for myself." Once more I am struck by Bruce's faith and conviction. I realise he has no need to know the intellectual ins and outs because he has faith. He has no need to analyse the overlapping pieces of the jigsaw puzzle to work out why they don't fit the theory. His theory is an approximation to the truth, but his truth is more relevant and important than the man-made puzzle pieces.

The general consensus among the four clairvoyants was:

• 3/1 Some form of spirit (either Spirit, spirit guide or deceased person) helps with their readings. Two see themselves solely as couriers or vehicles delivering information from this source.

• 3/2 Free will is largely, if not wholly, the determinant of our individual futures.

• 3/3 Some degree of the future may be fixed.

• 3/4 Time is irrelevant to precognition: either there is 'no time' or 'the only time is now'.

• 3/5 Aspects of their readings are often received and delivered in symbolism.

• 3/6 They predict 'probable', 'possible' or 'likely' future outcomes.

• 3/7 Responsibility of the client for their own future is seen as paramount.