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Fifteen It sounds like stories from the land of spirits If any man obtain that which he merits, Or any merit that which he obtains. Coleridge Under Marie’s guidance, Ted began training to work as a psychic, or a medium, as the National Spiritual Association of Churches defined the phenomenon. According to their state- ment, “A Medium is one whose organism is sensitive to vibrations from the spirit world and through whose instru- mentality intelligences in that world are able to convey messages and produce the phenomenon of Spiritualism.” This certainly seemed to describe Ted’s abilities. His experiences with the mammy apparition and more especially with the ghost of Miss Flowers showed that his sensitivity opened him to spirit communications. Beginning, then, in late 1970 he studied Spiritualist teachings. Marie tutored him in the movement’s history and development as well as the church’s philosophy, none of which he’d heard before. An entirely new world of the metaphysical was his to explore, and Ted was a star pupil. After his initial study, Ted and several others in the group started actual training sessions. As part of each meeting, they spent at least an hour learning how to meditate and how to recognize and share the messages that were received in this manner. The group usually consisted of twenty or so members, and in the practice sessions everyone had an opportunity to pass along psychic communications to someone else in the group. When Ted’s turn came, he found that, just as he’d The Call - Fifteen done with the photos in Maya’s album, he had no trouble at all receiving apparently psychic material in his meditations. His method was similar, too: he studied the face of each member and then was able to make statements about each one. The accuracy of his statements convinced Marie that Ted was indeed the man whose coming had been predicted. Clearly he belonged in the group and had strong psychic tal- ents which were already quite active. Even in his early phase of training, Ted was able to do things that Marie could do only after she’d been through long and vigorous training. She realized that his gift was exceptionally powerful. But there were other things she could teach him. A med- ium needed to know the best way to refine the incoming messages and deliver them without causing any offense or harm to the person for whom they were intended. Marie’s expertise in this area was invaluable to Ted. She taught him to keep any highly personal material to himself until it could be communicated in private and thus avoid embarrassing the recipient. And she taught him never to read someone without the person’s permission, for such readings constituted an invasion of privacy just as much as listening in on phone calls or intimate conversations would be. Furthermore, Ted had to be shown how to interpret the content of psychic messages which were often delivered in vague signals or symbols. If he saw dark clouds gathering above a subject, for instance, he learned to recognize what such symbols might mean: there was going to be ‘rain on the parade.’ There was a whole psychic language of symbols to be learned, and Marie was able to teach him about such things. Ted learned quickly. Before long, Marie had him up per- forming before large crowds, reading many people in the audience with ease and finesse. One after the other, the indi- viduals Ted selected received messages that flooded into his mind as he concentrated on the person’s face. The accuracy of his readings was soon widely known. And when he’d mas- tered that level of his education and performance, the study sessions intensified. With amazing speed, he conquered each Masquerade of Angels 141