“Nothing real can be threatened.
Nothing unreal exists.
Herein lies the peace of God.”
~A Course in Miracles
By Catherine Austin Fitts
I tense up when I get the calls. I can usually hear it after the first few syllables. Sometimes, it takes one or two sentences. It is the Touch.
Someone calls me. They want to have lunch or dinner. They are feeling supremely confident. Delighted to have gotten the call they got first, the request, the errand to speak with me. They are sure they can help.
We have lunch or dinner, perhaps have a conference call. They call me “dear” as in “Dear, people like us….” or “Dear, sometimes it is necessary to….” They are usually nice people. They often mean well.
The person who called them is not necessarily so nice, although he was highly charming when he spoke with them. He is, however, very rich or very powerful. Or he represents people who are.
I exercise extraordinary patience. As a result I slowly discern the concept behind the call of what I am doing and why I am doing it and what will inspire me to do what is desired.
Invariably it is something that will make money for the people who ordered up the call. The proposals demonstrate little understanding about me, or my motivations. Instead, there are stereotypes that have been passed down the line.
No one is, of course, offering to pay, let alone market prices.
There is no “let’s make a deal.” Too bad. At least there is some possibility for alignment, for a forthright negotiation that wastes no one’s time.
Bit by bit, I describe a fact or two of the situation.
Sometimes, my luncheon or dinner partner gets concerned by the introduction of parallel universes. By the gaps between reality and official reality. Myths slowly start to pop. Things start to feel muddled. That wonderful flow inspired by the call, the nod, the request, dissipates.
Sometimes, the electricity of having received the Touch is so powerful, they are immune to concern. They are too busy contemplating the flow of pet treats that will be forthcoming now that they are “in.”
In New York, they used to call it the “halo effect.” Doormen felt they had more power when they opened a door for a billionaire.
Somehow I never got the gist of it. If a janitor will pay me fair and square, I would rather open doors for a janitor than enjoy the touch of billionaires who offer merely the prestige of being in Touch.
I used to belong to a highly prestigious country club on Long Island. One day, the heir to one of the more prestigious fortunes represented in the membership pulled my then husband aside and confessed that he had thought him a social climber. However, since he had married me, the heir concluded that he was ok. I had, he said, negative social value.
This must explain my reticence in lapping up social prestige in exchange for giving away intellectual capital and hard work for free, not to mention on an activity that involves the overt part of a move involving covert criminality.
One of the many blessings of watching the Touch operate around you for decades is this more than any technique helps you understand how power and money really work at an intimate level – within a community, a family, a business.
It reveals the train tracks of real power.
You can map the world by watching whom gets Touched and, for the serious manipulations, what they give and what they get.
I used to say that the way I could bless people was positioning them so that they could be bought away.
In the end the hardest part is not to hope too much for a group of people who are immune to the Touch, who can see it coming, understand it for what it is. Each year, my faith grows stronger. Perhaps this is the true goal of the process.
I have a poster from TD Jakes on my kitchen corkboard because I need reminding.
“You ought to rejoice because you are pursuing a goal that defies human manipulation.”
But there are also days I remember a talented entrepreneur bemoaning an article in the Philadelphia Magazine about judges throwing cases for under the table payments. He was completely dejected. The problem he said was not that judges threw cases. The fact of the matter was that judges were throwing cases in all the major cities. The problem locally was that they would do it for $300.
We all get tricked. It happens to the best of us. But why are so many of us so willing to exchange things valuable, even priceless, for a mere Touch?
