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Recently in Salon People

Nothing Personal
Hip, hip and away I go!
There's no need to fear, Al is here! When the going gets tough, the Gores get literal. Plus: Out of the ring into the ring? More on the great WWF migration. And, Scully and Mulder smooch.
By Amy Reiter
[11/02/99]

Brilliant Careers
Garry Trudeau
The most powerful voice for truth and justice in American journalism is the junkyard dog of editorial cartooning -- and the creator of "Doonesbury."
By David Rubien
[11/02/99]

Nothing Personal
Munster movies
Widow's peaked: Eddie and Grandpa are baaack ... their careers, not so much. Posh Spice on how to get famous in 30 days or your money back; and Anna Nicole Smith's late, great, reprobate husband.
By Amy Reiter
[11/01/99]

People Feature
The dearth of cool
Are white hipsters an endangered species? Is sellout just another word for nothing left to lose?
By Frank Houston
[11/01/99]

People Feature
Warm for Wendy
More beautiful in person than on TV, Wendy Shalit is nonetheless just a modest woman -- with much to be modest about.
By Dov J. Levine
[11/01/99]

Complete archives for People

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Having seen what appears to be a star in close proximity.

Familiarity with a certain star or star system in the sky.

Dreams of UFOs and alien beings.

Dreams of being in an elevator or going underground.

Dreams of being under water, breathing under water, and/or breathing other liquids.

Dreams of doctors doing medical procedures on you or others.

Dreams of sexual encounters with people with unknown faces or no faces.

Dreams of flying or floating above your bed.

Having the feeling that you have been watched throughout your lifetime.

Being compelled to take a drive or go out by yourself with no real reason why.

Buzzing, ringing, humming, or pulsating sound in one or both ears.

Consistently waking up at the same time in the middle of the night.

As a child, had nightmares and feared sleeping alone. Often wanted to sleep with parents.

The meeting began when Deborah, a friend of Jan and Miesha, tinkled a bell. Jan put on a CD with serene synthesized music. She dimmed the lights and turned off the phone. She sat on the floor cross-legged and led us in meditation. She instructed us to see our breathing. "Every cell in your body is filled with pure white light," she said. She told us to visualize our "crown shocker" -- that's how I heard it -- which is apparently something on top of our head that controls the energy route into our body. (I learned much later, from my yoga-literate wife, that it's a crown "chakra.")

"The universe and all the loving extraterrestrials are bringing beautiful pure white light through that crown shocker," Jan said.

This went on for a while.

"Now say to yourself, I give myself permission to remember my purpose of being here on Earth."

She talked of going forward, forgiveness, love.

"Now imagine a beautiful being of light ... that being is about 15 feet from you ... You know that this being is going to bring you a message -- a message of higher consciousness ... As you get this information you know intuitively it is appropriate to you, it brings peace of mind to you and brings you closer to your brothers and sisters in the sky."

She told us to open our eyes. Everyone seemed to have entered some improved state of mind. Then came the highlight of the evening. A woman I'll call Maddie (she wanted anonymity) produced a cassette tape. We would be listening to it. She had taped a man named Darryl Anka channeling an alien named Bashar. Anka had been doing this for years, mostly in Las Vegas and Southern California, and he'd written books filled with Bashar's insights into our world. This particular channeling had been conducted recently in Vegas and had required a $20 admission fee.

Anka began by saying, rather straightforwardly, I thought, "You'll have to believe he's a separate being from myself to get some benefit out of this."

For the next 45 minutes no one in Miesha's apartment moved or talked. We just listened. Anka, on tape, took a deep breath. After a pause he suddenly began speaking in a loud, fast, manic voice, slightly mechanical, with extremely precise enunciation, as though he were part human and part robot. "We would like to begin this transmission with the following ideas," Anka/Bashar said.

What came next was an eruption of what can only be called erudite-sounding gibberish. Bashar's genius is that he sounds brilliant, even omniscient, even as the words themselves do not really add up to anything meaningful. "See beyond your patterns! Look at the obstacles and thus expand your reality!" he said, sounding increasingly like Rex Harrison, I thought. "This is physics. Everything is energy. Everything is energy and motion."

Someone asked Bashar a question about a problem she had in her personal life. "You have to function as a totality! As a holistic system!" Bashar said. He advised one questioner to tell his parents that he is an alien from another world and then cut all ties to them. Otherwise his advice was nothing but bland self-help nostrums, like "Move toward pleasure and away from pain."

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