Laura's talk about how Psychic Horizons began
Since this is our 40th anniversary, I have been asked to talk a little bit about how Psychic Horizons began.
When the school incorporated, I was 30 years old, and had been teaching for four years, but didn’t really know what I was getting into. This is the short version of how the school started.
Before I moved to San Francisco, I was involved in civil rights, the women’s movement and the anti-Vietnam war movement. This was the 60s and 70s, and I helped to put out community newspapers, organize demonstrations and do community organizing. I had dropped out of college in Florida due to my political activities, and moved to Louisville, KY where my best friend had gone. I ended up completing my studies at the university there and planned to go to law school.
But then some friends of mine moved to San Francisco. I had been working as a paralegal and realized that I didn’t really want to go to law school because it was too removed from everyday people’s lives. My roommate was a lawyer and I saw what he went through. I had become close with a friend of mine named Beverly and I asked her if she wanted to go to SF with me. Within a week we were on the road, along with her 4-year old daughter. (Beverly raise hand)
After camping across the country, we arrived in SF 3 months later with $500 to our name, but we managed to squeak by financially. We met a neighbor right away who was going to psychic school in Berkeley. Beverly was intrigued, as she had gotten her masters in psychology, but I wasn’t the least bit interested.
That year she wanted a book named Seth Speaks for Christmas. If you’re not familiar with it, it is written by Jane Roberts, who channeled a being named Seth, who spoke about spiritual laws of the universe, how things worked spiritually in the world, and so forth. There weren’t very many books like that at the time. I was in total resistance to it and thought it was ridiculous, but eventually I read the book.
As a result of reading that book, my whole world tilted 180 degrees. I knew that what was written in that book was true, but it was antithetical to everything I had believed up to that point. I was in a fog and had to recalibrate everything for several months. Afterwards Beverly dragged me to a reading in Berkeley, and by the time we were done I knew that’s what I would be doing with my life. So Psychic Horizons is really Beverly’s fault.
I went to psychic school in Berkeley, and when I finished I was asked to teach there. But shortly after that we went on vacation and when we returned I discovered that I had been kicked out of the school. I was never told why. I began teaching on my own in my apartment, which was on the 4th floor of an apartment building in the Fillmore. The elevator was old with one of those antique gates and was frequently out of order, but I still had a few students. After a few months, Beverly and I began teaching classes together.
That didn’t last too long, as she moved back to Kentucky. I began teaching on my own again, now in my apartment in Noe Valley, and I was discussing what I was doing with friends from Berkeley. But instead of being supportive, they began invalidating and criticizing what I was doing, telling me this would never work in SF and I was a fool for doing what I was doing. Since I was committed to the teaching, I decided I would no longer communicate with them until I had more certainty with my teaching.
I had never had any training in teaching, so it took about three years until I felt I had the certainty I needed. By then I no longer wanted to communicate with my former friends. I did want to teach with someone else though, so I asked a guy I had known in Berkeley to teach with me. He was great except he was a transmedium and got distracted and went off somewhere one day and I never heard from him again.
Someone recommended a guy named Ned, so we started teaching together. He and I had very different styles and had different ideas about where these classes should go, so we ended up having a number of fairly intense discussions. But we still managed to teach together for a number of years.
One day several of the students told me that their friends wanted to know where they were going, and that they needed to name what they were doing. Basically, they wanted us to have a school. We looked into it, and discovered that being an educational institution wouldn’t work because the state could then interfere with what we were teaching. The only way around that was to become a religious institution of some kind. Since I wasn’t Buddhist or Jewish, a church was it.
In order to have a church we needed to write a creed. So Ned and I sat down to write it. We had a lot of disagreements and ended up having a knock-down drag-out fight that first day. We decided to leave it alone for a few days, clean out, write down what each of us wanted, and come back together later. The second time around we wrote the creed in about ½ hour.
The creed is the basis and foundation for the Church of Natural Grace and Psychic Horizons. It is the grounding for the church and the school, and incorporates in a few short paragraphs what we teach.
I’ll read each sentence and then talk about it. If you would like to look at in meditation as I talk, feel free to do so. Here is how it goes:
First Sentence: We, the Church, believe that we are of God and that we are whole unto ourselves.
This reflects our basic dichotomy as human beings: that we are part of God, of the universe, yet we are whole individuals. We are part of and participate in God and in God-like qualities, so that there is no real separation between who we are and God. From this we can generate tremendous certainty about who we are, we can feel validated for who we are, we can feel strength for who we are.
At the same time, this does not mean that we give up our individuality. Our bodies literally symbolize who we are as individual people, for our bodies separate us from each other. Through our bodies, we have different personalities, likes and dislikes. Our individuality is our creativity, our learning experience, and lives out our purpose in being here on the planet. Who we are as individuals on this planet is how we evolve as people, and how we evolve as spirit as well.
Second Sentence: We affirm our Being and understand that we as Spirit manifest through our flesh as unique creators.
We can validate ourselves as spiritual beings. We also validate that we manifest through our body. This is what we have chosen. This is our path. We have chosen this path with awareness.
Third Sentence: To understand and to manifest our inherent freedom is to affirm and accept life.
Inherent freedom is what we have as spiritual Beings, and as spiritual beings in physical bodies. We affirm that, we can accept that If we allow ourselves to. We don’t have to resist it, although we do. We don’t have to resist being on the planet, but we do, and we have chosen to work through our bodies and encounter all that that implies. There is pain, emotion, hunger, confusion, aloneness; but also creativity, pleasure, joy, love, enthusiasm, friendship, relationship, direction, purpose. To accept that we have a body means we can stop fighting it, and get on with it.
Fourth Sentence: It is through inner communication that we discover awareness.
We cannot have real awareness unless we know who we are inside. We cannot know who we are unless we communicate with ourselves. We are inside ourselves.
Fifth Sentence: Through the attainment of true communication we set ourselves free.
True communication means to be loyal to your own soul.
True communication means to "let the shell perish that the pearl may appear."
We are free beings, we just need our self-communication in order to find our internal freedom.
Sixth Sentence: The Bible states, "Seek ye first the Kingdom of God, and all these things shall be added unto thee;"
Everything comes as a result of seeking the kingdom of God.
Seventh Sentence: "The Kingdom of God is within you." This is our perspective.
We know where the Kingdom is -- within us -- particularly because we are of God.
Eighth and last sentence: We believe in the everlasting present, the wonders of permission, continual understanding and ever-growing compassion.
There’s a lot here in this sentence.
The everlasting present allow us to be whoever or whatever we choose. The present is everlasting. It never disappears. We can always be present; there is no true reality called "past" or "future".
The wonders of permission are incredible things. We can grow, be, do, communicate, create and enjoy with permission. Without it, life is hard, difficult, judgmental, limited. We prefer the wonders of permission.
Understanding and compassion comprise our ability to understand ourselves and others. We can be neutral yet compassionate, understanding yet not merge with others. Our understanding and compassion is part of our permission, and part of our presence with ourselves and others. It is part of our humanness, yet embodies our spirituality. It creates room for us to be who we are.
This is our creed. It is incorporated into our Articles of Incorporation and has been the grounding of the Church of Natural Grace/Psychic Horizons for over 40 years. Please say hello to it, and allow your understanding and information to flow through you. Say hello to the God of your Heart, and feel that presence.
Writing this creed didn’t mean Psychic Horizons just jumped into everyone’s consciousness. Just the opposite! It took about 3 years for us to become legally incorporated and to get our federal tax ID number. At that time, there were a lot of scams involving churches and cults and so forth, so the authorities took their time. We received our legal incorporation Feb 17, 1981. The first graduation from clairvoyant training took place shortly after that. One of the first to graduate was Shirley, who some of you know, who now does our graphics, website and marketing emails.
In order to get out of my apartment, we had moved into a room next to the garage of a friend’s house in the Sunset. Everything took place there – classes, healing clinics and readings, and some readings took place in the garage. Healees sat on the floor of that room while others received their healings. We had very few students for a while afterwards. I almost threw in the towel several times. I was working full time at an investment banking company, and teaching, plus doing a few other things on the side. I wasn’t convinced that this was going to work, but for some reason I kept going. A few more people graduated.
My friends moved out of the house we were using, so we took over the whole house. Eventually the neighbors complained with all the people coming and going and we needed to move out of the neighborhood. We found a house on 4th Ave and Geary that we thought was perfect, but it was represented by a realtor who wouldn’t rent to us because he thought we were a cult. We tried several times to no avail.
But we knew that was our house. We kept looking for another appropriate place anyway. We drove all over the city and looked at many places. We knew we needed to keep the energy moving regardless of whether or not we found anything, because we didn’t want the energy to stagnate, and because we knew we had already found our house. We didn’t find anything else suitable.
We went back to the leasing agent, and we concocted this plan. We would get him to leave his desk to go copy something and while he was gone, we would look at the open file on his desk to discover who the owner was. The plan worked. The owner lived in Walnut Creek and owned a Persian Rug Store.
We drove to Walnut Creek and found the owner. Since I grew up in Iran I thought I could talk him into renting to us. I don’t know if that was the reason, but he agreed to rent us the house. Now we had to go through the rental agent again.
Boy was he pissed! He told us we could rent the house if we could come up with the deposit in cash within a few hours that same day. By then it was about 4 pm on a Saturday. The banks were closed. At that time there were very few ATMs and the school didn’t have an ATM card, and neither did I. So the students who were working with me, including Shirley, put together all their ATM cards and we ran around the city getting the cash we needed from the accounts of those who were there. We barely made it by his deadline, and we did rent the house at 4th Ave and Geary.
It was a godsend. That is where Psychic Horizons grew and within 3 years we outgrew the house. What happened there is another story, and we have many good stories, but these are the abbreviated beginnings of Psychic Horizons.
