The Psychic Next Door: Ordinary People with Extraordinary Powers

by Karen Zimmerman

  “You weren’t just running around doing spells — you did a lot of research. They emphasized that you are on your own and you make your own life. That really impressed me.”

  Communing with the Spirits

  Gypse believes everyone has spirits at different levels of evolution. You might have your family, your grandparents, etc. Some people in your family might contact you, but they are still at the same level of enlightenment they were when they died, and trying to solve their own karmic problems — they are not enlightened. The spirits she communicates with are by and large not her own ancestors, although her grandmother, who was from the Scottish highlands, sometimes pops in for a visit. Her grandmother read tea leaves, but had no interest in the occult — to read tea leaves was normal in her culture, and many people did so.

  “If you keep working, you have angels around you. You have gods and goddesses around you, and you have more enlightened spirits around you, like spiritual masters,” Gypse says. “You have a hierarchy of spirits around you, and then you have your highest spirit, whatever it is that you believe — god, goddess, Jesus, Isis, whomever.”

  Gypse can see those spirits and communicate with them. “Sometimes I see them walking around and usually, 90 percent of the time, I see them as a shadowy form in my own mind, but I can describe very clearly what they look like and what they have on and they talk to me,” she says. “And they talk to me constantly.” They’ll talk to her in the morning, when she reads her Tarot cards, and tell her what her daily “assignments” are, and she always writes them down. Some days, she says, the spirit messages come every few hours and she ends up with stacks and stacks of notes.

  “At this point, I am doing this note writing as a meditation and have learned to just start crossing things off. Going back, some years the spirits were really accurate and other years, they were not so accurate because I wasn’t really able to take in what they were saying. I was too worried about me.” Sometimes, she says, what she thinks is significant is not validated by spirit message.

  In Gypse’s world, spirits are not ghosts. Ghosts are spirits who are not evolving. The spirits she sees are evolving in the spirit world. She doesn’t like the word “guide,” but uses it because it’s easily understandable by others.

  Gypse’s guides are strict, and let her know what she can and cannot reveal about her spiritual life. One of her spirit guides, the only one she was free to talk about , is a fakir, a Muslim or Hindu monk said to be a wonder worker. “She likes to move things around,” Gypse says. “She’s very advanced — she’s a witch — she was an aristocrat in England. So she just does that. She is at a very high level, but she can’t stop doing that. She enjoys doing it and she does it for fun.”

  Gypse went into computer drafting because she was interested in art. “I had spirits around me who were interested in that, were interested in the computers, were interested in working in that industry in the spirit world, and interested in furthering technology and helping mankind by furthering technology and so they have directed me in this company.”

  Have you ever wondered why you end up doing certain things, make your living a certain way? Gypse believes that this is all the work of the enlightened spirits.

  “They tell me what to do. You can say my boss is the highest force and then there are others on the lower scale, down where we are, and they have different things they want me to accomplish, so the company is run by them in the spirit world and me on the earth plane.

  “So, it’s coming through me in my work, and, actually I’m a CEO, but the spirits are like my board of directors,” Gypse says. “They are all advising me, and sometimes it’s hard to figure out what they are saying because I have so many spirits telling me so many things. I have to sift through and decide which spirit to listen to now, which spirit to listen to next week.”

  Gypse rarely encounters malevolent spirits. She recalls one incident when she was working on a now-defunct website that gave automatic Tarot readings.

  “It got taken over by Satanism, and I couldn’t figure out why. The guy who wrote the site for me told me later that his ex-girlfriend was into the dark side of Santeria. I can never use the code or the site again, because very time I try to use it, I see the Devil. So, that’s a malevolent spirit.

  “I think the problem is that I can’t see the bad in people,” she continues. “I can’t see it, so I’m in danger. I have to wait for the spirits to come and tell me and sometimes the spirits will make me do something —interact and then I find out that person is going to do me in and that’s my weak spot. I can’t see. I’m more of an optimist.”

  Her Spirit Family

  Gypse doesn’t work with her ancestors — not her blood ancestors, at any rate. She works with a family she has found in the spirit world. But sometimes the lines are blurred. Her grandfather (who came to her in spirit) claimed that he knows someone she knows in this life, and had a message. “So, I told this person that I got a certain message from my grandfather. He understood it and was able to interpret it and help me with it, and it was really strange.”

  Gypse says she has a spirit daughter who is in pre-med. “My aunt was married to a professor at Harvard medical school. He died. My aunt had just had a brain tumor removed, noncancerous, and my spirit daughter assisted in the surgery — I didn’t tell my aunt this. This is how the spirits help us. And then I got freaked out, because my uncle, when he was alive, was really terrifying, he was a snob. When you think of a superstar doctor, that’s him.

  “All of a sudden, I hear him saying that my spirit daughter is phenomenal, that he wants to train her to become a surgeon. Well, she wasn’t planning on becoming a surgeon. In my mind, she is my daughter. My spirit family is in a different world, and I am very close to her.

  “When they suddenly cross the line, and someone peripheral to my real family that I barely know, is suddenly directing my spirit child, I can’t explain how strange it is. Because the message coming through was so strong. I guess somewhere in the spirit world my ancestors are connected to my spirit family and we all knew each other and we’re all going to reincarnate again.

  “Maybe part of me thinks this world isn’t really real, it’s all happening in the spirit world, and when they start interpenetrating with my real family who are dead, my brain can barely handle it. Because there’s a difference in my mind, between my spirit family, who doesn’t feel like they are dead to me, and my uncle, who I know died. And if I hear him, he’s faint, and I’m not hanging out with him in the spirit plane, I never heard from him after he died.

  “So, I’m thinking, ‘What does this mean?’ I’m growing in my understanding of how the spirits relate. Both these incidents show me I don’t control this. I’m just watching this. I’m getting the messages. They don’t have anything to do with me. It very much disturbs me. It’s a different aspect of the spirit world that I’m not used to.

  “Life is bigger than us. The abilities I have are not necessarily for me, but I can observe more, but I don’t always know what it means, I just know it is happening.

  “I was so disturbed. What I wanted to be able to do is to call my aunt and say my daughter is working with your husband. That’s where the disconnect is. She would say, ‘but my husband is dead, and you don’t have a daughter. You better go see a shrink!’”

  Gypse thinks her uncle came to her because he wants her spirit daughter to be a surgeon. She was going to be a dermatologist. “In another life, I will have children. He’s telling me not to hold my future child back, he wants her to go to medical school to become a surgeon. And to most people walking around, I have no daughter; it’s just me. But I know I have a daughter,” she tells me. “It’s like I see you with your spirit daughter. I know you have a spirit child. When that child comes to me, I give you the message. I feel like I know that child.”

  The spirit world is very, very real, she says. In some ways, more real to her than this everyday world. “I feel more comfortable with people who are dead than alive
, the people who have crossed over. The people who are alive, they are going to go elsewhere. The people who are over there, I feel more solid with that.”

  Art Imitates Life

  Gypse describes an episode from the first season of the television show Six Feet Under that she says fairly accurately depicts what she experiences. David, one of the mortician characters, is working on the body of a gang leader. Meanwhile, the spirit of the dead man is standing next to David, giving him life advice.

  The dead man, “Hangs out with David and helps him get tough,” Gypse says. “It’s not anything scary, and what’s implied, and what’s so accurate is, if you experience it, it’s that normal, once you get used to it.”

  “There’s the feeling that the spirit giving the advice is somehow wiser, and can see more — what you can’t see, and you see David’s willingness to listen to the advice. And it’s perfect, because he’s using it at work, he’s using it at his job. Whoever wrote that really knows what it’s like. It’s a fictional story, but the way it’s portrayed is not fictional, it really is like that,” she says.

  “I would say to people who haven’t experienced it, that it’s a really accurate depiction. This is how I live, that’s how I do my job.”

  The Tarot

  Gypse views the Tarot as a sacred text, like the Bible or other historic spiritual record. She was drawn to the cards, she thinks, because of her art background. She equates studying the Tarot with the study of the Torah — one of her grandfathers was Jewish. Both, she says, are an ongoing study of self-analysis and self-understanding of your spiritual path.

  “I find that when you go to church and you read the Bible, it’s different. You’re praying, you’re interacting with Jesus. When you are a witch, you’re creating your reality with your meditation, your psychic protections, your spirits, and your spells” she says. “And when you do the Tarot, it’s almost like you’re doing surgery on your inner self, because you realize you’re going to become enlightened and it’s a process you work on every day.”

  She reads the Tarot a couple of hours a day, and says that she’s recently begun receiving messages from God, telling her to continue to read the Tarot. While Gypse believes in Jesus, she does not consider herself a Christian, because she also believes that other deities exist. “What’s hilarious is that my sister is in the Christian Right, and I had a question about something and she asked me why I didn’t open the Bible at random and see what it has to say (this is called stichomancy). I mean, really, what’s the difference between opening the Bible and using the Tarot?”

  Whether she’s reading for herself or for others, she sometimes gets messages for which the meaning isn’t known.

  “I think is was last Friday. I was throwing the cards. I had decided to throw the cards for morning, noon, afternoon, and evening, just to see what’s happening. I got the Devil at noon,” she says. The Devil card is said to mean excess or loss of control. “What does that mean? It had no meaning in my current life. Well, at noon, I was sitting there paying some bills and there were all these sirens. There was a big fire and a house burnt down, the fire was out of control. It’s just information. Is that what the card meant? Who knows? It’s just a reminder to be alert.”

  When Gypse was reading Tarot cards in my store, she had many repeat customers who found her to be very accurate. But she remembers few of those readings, as she enters an altered state when doing them. “They aren’t about me,” she said. “The messages I get are for the person I’m reading for — I don’t feel that I’m supposed to remember them.”

  She reminded me that she saw my partner in my cards. “He was the Six of Cups. I told you that would have a relationship with a soul mate and you already had met him.”

  Like other psychics in this book, Gypse says people often don’t hear messages if they are not ready to hear them. If they come for a reading on one thing, they won’t listen to messages about something else. It’s where the person being read is focused — if they want information on a current situation, they aren’t interested in what might happen in the future.

  When I was looking for psychics to interview, I asked a woman I know who is active in the local Tarot community. She told me that she isn’t psychic. I also read Tarot cards, but I am not psychic. I know what the cards mean and how they relate to each other in a layout, but I rarely feel comfortable reading for other people.

  I asked Gypse how people who aren’t psychic get messages to pass along to people. Gypse feels reading Tarot cards, even just for yourself, opens you up to other spiritual knowledge; that this knowledge comes from a part of our brain we don’t use now, but did use in ancient times.

  “It’s using your brain, it’s increasing your awareness. You’re talking to me now, and I have limitations in my awareness. If I were the Dalai Lama, I would be telling you very different things. The spiritual world exists. Man is evolving and one day, the word psychic won’t exist. We think, in this modern culture, that we are so advanced. I think we are primitive and just not using parts of our brain. Some cultures are very comfortable using that part of our brain — Native Americans and others.”

  She said that if people used that part of their brain, they would tune in to the spiritual side of life. “I was reading something by Malidoma Somé. He is a shaman in West Africa. He’s pretty radical. He says that in his culture, they respect the earth, and that’s the first thing. And they develop their psychic skills based on that.”

  The way we view reality governs how we behave, she says. In her case, she works both ways — she has what people would consider “normal” periods and then she goes into another level of awareness. To her, it’s normal, because she is used to herself — to having experiences and having spirits come and tell her how to interpret these experiences and tell her what to do.

  Here’s a case in point, with the spirits speaking through the Tarot: “The other day I had to go into a phone conference and I looked at the cards before I went into the meeting, I had one engineer working with me. We had written two kinds of proposals — I saw in the cards that the client was interested in developing the secondary proposal. I saw they had money for that, not the first proposal. I mentioned this to the engineer before we went into the meeting, and he wondered how I knew that.

  “I just told him, ‘Look, I read it in the Tarot cards,’ and he looked at me and said ‘Okay.’ He didn’t really know what else to say. Why should I be ashamed of this? I’m tired of pretending I don’t read the Tarot cards.”

  She said she doesn’t always know how to interpret the cards — that they serve as more of an analysis tool. “You have to figure out how to look at yourself and where your strengths and weaknesses lie. It’s not predictions, it’s more like the trends. It’s like the weather. What are the odds? What’s that person’s temperament? What’s my karma? Then make a more educated guess.”

  Most Tarot readers will tell you that the cards show what will happen if you continue on the path you are on. Change your path, change your life.

  I mentioned that some people say you can’t read your own Tarot cards because you will just project onto the cards what you want them to say.

  Gypse strongly disagrees. “That is completely wrong,” she says. “You can give yourself total therapy with the cards. I’ve been reading the cards for years, and I know where I am with my life’s journey with the cards and what my current challenges are, based on the iconography of the cards. You have certain tests you have to go through, you have certain challenges that you cannot escape as a growing soul. So the cards tell you what you have to learn, and what you need to work on. They are very humbling. It’s a good way to look at yourself and see your bad side. It’s not so clear when I see my good side – ‘Okay, so I’m doing well, but I’m still gong to have problems. I’m glad I’m doing well here, now I’m going to have to learn this.’”

  Relationships on the Earth Plane

  Gypse is still married to the “crazy artist” she met shortly after college.
She says she’s always giving him messages. “He’s used to it. I tell him the spirits say we should be doing this and the spirits say we should be doing that. Sometimes he’ll ask me, ‘What are the spirits saying now?’ And sometimes he just ignores me.

  “He’s very supportive. He thinks the messages are accurate. I give him a lot of credit to be able to grow with the messages because I’ve given him some really hard ones.”

  She’s had people she’s given messages to get really angry with her, because she’s telling them what they don’t want to do, but really should be doing. The messages could have to do with anything from changing jobs to divorcing a spouse to whether to have a child, to more mundane matters in everyday life.

  “It is kind of an invasion of space. It’s kind of rude. I’m very unaware in that way. I’m a clunky Taurus. I’m not the most diplomatic person, and some people take it the wrong way.”

  Her parents, she said, believe in her abilities because they’ve been helped by them. With other people, she’s usually open. Sometimes too open, she said. “Because I assume people know what I’m talking about. If I remember someone from another life, like I remember you, I tell them. Most people don’t remember; I don’t know why.”

  Spirits Can Be Tough Taskmasters

  Gypse says the spirit world has laws. She can’t talk about some things. “I don’t even know why. All I know is that bad things happen when I talk too much. There’s some kind of energy released and it’s dangerous.” The spirits, in fact, told her that she could not use her real name for this book.

  There are laws of the universe, she said. Laws of nature. The amount of our brain we use isn’t much. We aren’t trained to use our subconscious, she believes. This belief is shared by parts of the psychoanalytic community, that there are inner forces (our subconscious) that effect our external behavior.