by Lorrie Kazan
This is why I’ll never go to Harvard…I can’t remember regular things. I remember poems I memorized in the 6th grade, but not the facts and figures I read yesterday—I tune into psychic things, talking to the dead, watching lights and TVs go on and off without reason, but keeping a focus and walking one straight line from thought to thought…I can forget it. If only I could forget it.
There’s a yearning within me to be the smarter one who knows things in provable ways. I do know things, I just don’t know how I know, can’t prove them, and don’t always know what they are until they come out of my mouth.
Ideas know me, talk through me. Sometimes I’m amazed at statements I utter while doing psychic readings and I think, I should remember that, but of course I won’t. I’ll remember that there’s something I should remember, and I’ll record the reading for the client, but probably won’t listen back because what highly self-critical person wants to listen to themselves talk?
If Harvard had a class for empaths, people who unwittingly channeled secret thoughts and fears of others…maybe they still wouldn’t accept me because they’d require paperwork which I’d avoid, misplace, misconstrue, and finally throw caution to the wind and try and do, but would they still expect a normal brain that starts from a and goes to z? And never believe what they see unless they can measure and repeat, which is really a good idea, except when it takes the life out of the moment.
“If only you’d apply yourself,” my mother used to say, hoping that like she I could be a legal secretary. So organized, she kept her divorce papers in triplicate. I still see the plump veins in her thin hands as she clutched those files that kept us endlessly in court against my wild and wooly father, forcing him to fess up about finances and other women.
Now it seems that everybody who’s almost anybody is currently claiming to suffer from some form of ADD or ADHD, yet it’s still not making internal chaos enough of a fashion statement to be honored by people who rule the world: Doubters, skeptics, deans of admission.
In Jung’s typology these rulers would likely be called “thinkers.” (And here’s another reason why I’ll never go to Harvard—I don’t want to expend the effort to explain typologies or even create a bridge from ADD to Jung.)
Suffice it to say that we all have major ways we process information. Jung breaks them into intuitive, emotional, thinking and sensate. You could correlate this with the elements: fire-intuitive, water-emotion, air-thought, earth-sensate.
Mine is an introverted intuitive-emotional mix, the antithesis of a thinker-sensate. Meaning, I could intuitively know the state of the world but not necessarily find my way out of a wrong turn if I were driving to the market. However, I have found right directions by simply praying to be guided, or survived an accident by a miraculous save.
I live in the U.S., which is considered an extroverted thinking country, (see analyst Robert Johnson’s The Golden World for an explanation.) And if you’re a thinker, you’re going to need a concrete explanation; an intuitive will get it a sense of it by scanning and might even know without knowing.
Ultimately, Jung said we have to develop all our senses. And that’s a story in itself, one that some Harvard grad has probably explained. We’re generally called to develop our “inferior” function after age 35. So, in mid-life, my “type” is called to face tasks that require the sensate-thinking aspects, while some logical person is confronted with the chaos of emotions and life not being what it seemed.
It seems that Carl Jung was one of those rare creatures who could speak in each typology. Robert Johnson recounts how Jung not only spoke to him in English, but also in Johnson’s feeling symbology.
Intuitives tend to speak in incomplete sentences since we’ve already moved ahead 10 steps once the words are in process. It feels as if the words sort of energetically bounce back and forth. Forget looking for a-z; we’re likely to start at m and move around poetically.
And here’s the issue I have today. I won’t go to Harvard because I can’t think in a sustained, rational way. And that’s the fault I bring to the close of this article, no concrete beginning, middle end. “It’s so simple,” my thesis professor once said, “state what you’re going to say, say it, and then say that you said it.”
So, in my non-linear way: I bewail that I won’t go to Harvard, a school that would make me look impressive and official. Even if they would take someone like me, I’d never get past their paperwork. I will, however, continue filling myself with interesting ideas, poetry, and will offer psychic readings as long as clients are willing. But I may never be able to prove why.
Lorrie Kazan
www.ilovemypsychic.com
