I don't believe in supernatural stuff but I have had two direct experience which have led me to question my doubt about such abilities.

Years ago my son's roommate drowned when he was on an outing of all his college suite mates. My son was devastated and was put in touch with an American Indian woman who said things that comforted him. Nine months later this woman (who I had never met) showed up at a class I was teaching saying she had to say a prayer for my son, and urging me to tell him to stay out of small boats, especially any boats that were paddled, like a canoe. I told him her message and two days later his girlfriend drowned in a rowboat that was being paddled like a canoe.

The other instance was at a party which I attended with a friend from England. The hostess told my friend she was sorry at the recent death in his family. My friend replied that there was no recent death in the family. The hostess said maybe it wasn't family but someone close to him. My friend could not figure out what the hostess was talking about. In the middle of the night we got a call from England that my frined's mother had just died.

The majority of letter writers still don't get what the book is about, I think. Is no one here insterested in WHY we have this need to prove that death couldn't possibly happen to us? For those of you who see this in terms of the intelligent design "theory," don't you agree that this is what religion IS, after all?

I think the main problem is that the interviewer chose to concentrate on anecdotal stories about "weird" incidents and "keeping and open mind" about the supernatural. I can almost assure you that this is NOT the topic of Ms. Roach's book. If you want that kind of thing, read the very disappointing "Lily Dale: The Story of the Town that Talks to the Dead," where the author goes to investigate a town of mediums and, though she claims to be a skeptic, leads us through the evolution of her personal awakening to the possibility of the "supernatural." Yuck.

There's nothing "dangerous" about this book. It's reporting on a segment of pseudo-science that, if it is actually dangerous and not just amusing (as it is to me), we are better off knowing about, yes?

This is probably going to be a strange letter but I thought I'd go ahead and write it. I am both a practicing psychic and a skeptic about psychic ability, the afterlife, reincarnation, all of it. I don't know how I do the things I do. I don't know why. It often embarresses me that I earn money doing this, and I wonder whether I'm simply hoodwinking people, fooling myself.

I've recently, at the age of 39, decided to go back to school to finish up my BA in Psych and then on to a Master's in Public Health. I want to do something that I don't have to fight so hard to make a living with, do something that is more in alignment to what is considered Okay in our society, but I also want to find a better way to use these "talents" or whatever else they are.

Back in school, in the midst of all of this science I've gained a healthy respect for science, even as I've sat through classes that describe what I do, what I believe I do, as mental illness. Am I mentally ill? Beats the heck out of me. I know things that I absolutely have no way of knowing. I see cancer and kidney problems. I see what a person's sugar habit is doing, how it fans out to wreak havoc on several levels at once. I see why this one's husband is acting the way he is, what that job will turn out to be, where the daughter is that ran away. But I don't see accurate things for everyone. I often don't see anything at all, or only vague, silly things. But how I've come to package it for myself is that I see in probabilities, that nothing is certain, that even predicting the weather is an inexact science.

A couple of things from your article I did want to address though, the first being how you and Mary didn't seem to understand why there would be silly spiritual languaging. The language stuff is odd because i find myself continually embarrassed at some of the words that I come out as I try to describe the things I'm seeing. It's as if the real senses get mixed up and I'm trying to describe a taste but only using words associated with vision. It's a common thing for people who have some sort of connection with the energetic world behind the material one (see? here I go . . .) whether they are a psychic or a meditator or a nun, to describe it in strange simplistic language. To say that I had a huge awakening around seeing that I Am That I Am would sound loony to you, but to a meditator who has gone deep, it would simply be a shared smile, knowing exactly what is being mentioned. The more Mind/Intellectual the word choices and concepts, the farther away you get from describing what is really occurring.

The second thing you mentioned in your article was why a dead person would choose to speak about mundane things. I would never say that I speak to dead people, but I have had people ask about people who have died and I have seen images of them and had them say things. It seems to me that what we find important here in the world mostly seems silly to them, if there is indeed a Them. Perhaps they think of listening to us like we would view listening to a three year old talk about Santa Claus. You don't want to bust their bubble because there is something very sweet and precious about the magic, but you also get that they will soon know the real deal about Santa. And the things that we could talk to a 3 year old about from our adult perspective - mortgages, office politics, plastic surgery - would probably seem just as strange and silly to them.

This is probably more than enough :) I enjoyed the article. I'm always happy to see people looking more deeply into this stuff. But there is more to it . . . There are a lot of "psychics" out there that aren't what they say they are, but there is something to the whole psychic-afterlife thing. . .