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As I mentioned in the"Meet Hank Friedman" page, when I was about five years old, I had
one of the most profound spiritual experiences of my life. I was lying in bed, at night, about to
fall asleep, when I found myself being taken into the presence of God. I was shown why I was born, what I was on Earth to accomplish, and how my life would unfold. At the conclusion of this incredible journey, I was told,"and now you will forget everything that was revealed to you, except the reality that this experience took place." I opened my eyes, and knew that I had been given a great gift, and understood, even at that early age, why I was not allowed to remember the details. (It would spoil the journey.) I obviously didn't know what to do with my vision, other than to remember it. As a young child with two older, and very competitive, sisters (5 and 8 years older), I very much wanted to win whenever we played games together. Without realizing what I was doing, when we played Monopoly, I would "talk" to the dice, and ask them to please get me to specific squares. I would often get the roll I wanted. This skill grew with age, until no one would play the game with me. (When I was about 24, on one New Years Eve, my girlfriend and I were visiting another couple and I mentioned this story. The other guy immediately challenged me and brought out a Monopoly board to test my abilities. I announced out loud what move I was asking for, and achieved 75% of the rolls I called in the first part of our game, and about 50% overall, by the time I won the game. I guess I never lost the knack. I've had more friends, upon hearing this story, ask me if I ever gambled at Las Vegas. The answer is no, I don't think I'm meant to use this gift that way.) It wasn't until I was in my early teens that my next psychic awakenings began. My two sisters and I began playing with a Rhine deck of cards. (The ones that have different patterns on each card: a square, a circle, a triangle, wavy lines, etc.) One of us would hold the card, while the others tried to guess what was on it. By chance, we should have guessed correctly about 5 out of 25 times. But instead, we never went lower than 10 correct calls, and often scored higher! We then realized that our entire family had quite a degree of ESP (as we called it in those days). Later, we began playing the game Password (where there are two teams, and one person of each team tries to guess the word his partner is holding). My sister Diane and I became so psychically linked that we could guess the others' word almost immediately, and won handily over all competition. In my late teens, my abilities became so strong that I had to suppress them. What happened was that I developed very strong short-term precognition. First, I became able to tell who was calling on the telephone when it rang. (And in a household of very big talkers, and lots of phone calls, that was no mean feat.) Then I began to know when the phone was going to ring (and who it would be) ahead of time. Once, my sister was about to leave to meet a friend. I told her "wait, your friend's about to call back changing the plans." Sure enough, within a couple of minutes, her friend did call back with a change of plans. Then I was walking to school, on the way to take a test, and my final score appeared in front of me. And I began knowing others' test scores ahead of time, and who was about to approach me from behind with a "guess who?", etc. I was even beginning to develop a reputation for being "strange". It finally got so frequent that everything began happening twice for me: once in my precognitive mind, and then a second time when it actually happened. You have no idea how unpleasant that became. I finally began to clench my whole body and mind forcefully, each time a precognition would come, until I had "slammed the door shut" successfully. I didn't have any precognitive experiences for years after that (except once a few years later, when I foresaw an entire year accurately). My firm footing on the Path began with, of all things, an act of President Nixon. I was in graduate school in neurochemistry, and conducting my doctoral research. Even though the funds for research had approved by Congress, Nixon withheld them from all of the schools across the country. As a result, my advisor took me aside and told me to "take the Summer off, and take whatever classes you want at the university, while we wait for the funds to be released." I've always loved animals, so I signed up for a course in animal behavior. When I got to the section of the college bookstore where the book for the course was placed, I happened to notice, next to it, "The Psychology of Consciousness" by Robert Ornstein. Since consciousness was really what I was interested in (and why I was studying neurochemistry) I bought the book, read it, and was never the same. I next went to the class that the book was offered for, which led me to SAT, an incredible transformational group created by Claudio Naranjo, integrating practices from the Sufis, Tibetan Buddhism, Hindu Meditation, Gestalt Therapy, and many other psychological and spiritual disciplines. In 1973, I attended a 5 day transformational intensive (run by SAT) where we were given a non-stop "crusher course" in personal growth. For an entire week after that, I could hear people's thoughts as clearly as if they had spoken them aloud. It was particularly telling in the case of one of my housemates. I had incorrectly assumed that she was just mean, because she could be very harsh and snappy for no reason. This week, however, when I could hear her thoughts, I realized that she had no malice in her whatsoever, just pain and confusion. At the end of the week, I approached her and apologized for pre-judging her, and told her,"I realize now that you never mean to hurt anyone, you just don't know how to stop it." The next week, her closest friend took me aside and said to me,"What did you say to her? For years, we've been trying to get her to go into therapy, but she always resisted. Whatever you said to her finally reached her, and she started therapy right away." I was touched and amazed that, completely without meaning to, I had helped her see herself. Do you want to read Part Two of Autobiography of a Psychic? click here Click to Return to 
Send e-mail to Hank Friedman by clicking here If the above email link doesn't work, please send me an email to: stars@soulhealing.com Copyright © 1998 Hank Friedman |