12

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 Here a Psychic, There a Psychic

At one introductory trance circle, a young woman asked Dillon if he could help her become a famous photographer. “You’re already famous with me,” Dillon quipped; “I don’t know what more I could possibly do for you in the fame department.”

Dillon never encouraged our thrust for personal status, much less fame. He posited “ego” as our spiritual nemesis and exhorted us to “overcome it.”

I was thinking about this one day as I waited at the Department of Motor Vehicles to renew my license. After 20 minutes in line, I got close enough to the counter to read that the renewal fee had gone up, from $4 to $7. I had $6 in my pocket … and my checkbook. But the sign also announced that they had stopped accepting checks.

It was a hot summer day and I was tired and fed up. The last thing I wanted to do was drive all the way home and back, just to wait another 20 minutes in line. In my prior, more dignified life, there would have been no alternative.

But my ruminations about ego suddenly ripened into a bold if unconventional action plan: Why not ask one of the 50 other patrons in line to save me an hour’s time by lending me the dollar I was short? I could then write them a personal check (or take their address and mail the dollar right back to them).

The thought of doing this threw me into immediate agitation and embarrassment. Was my resistance to so practical a solution something I should endeavor to “overcome”? I took a deep breath, turned to the person behind me in line and began describing my predicament.

A woman standing distinctly off to the side quickly pulled a dollar from her purse and rushed over with it. When I began to write her a check, she emphatically put up her hand, stating: “I have been told that I should give you this money, that it’s important. Under the circumstances, it wouldn’t be right for me to accept your check.”

Now it could just be that a disproportionate percentage of Normal’s population isn’t.  But I preferred to take meaning from what had just transpired: that Dillon (or some other privy to my internal process) had gotten the attention of my flesh and blood benefactor. Who in turn was willing to underwrite a buck’s worth of my spiritual education.

More was accomplished here, in my estimation, than the avoidance of a drive home to get the extra dollar.