Worker in the Light Unlock Your Five Senses And Liberate Your Limitless Potential

Chapter One The Ouija Board It came in an old nondescript box addressed to me. A fan had sent it. With a simple, "Here," a studio technician handed me the box just before I went on the air. I had no idea what it was. Maybe it was a gift given in good conscience. Maybe someone sent it to me on a dare. I'll never know for sure. Whatever the sender's intention, the weathered and worn Ouija board inside the box ultimately took me to the very edge of reality, from which point I looked over the brink into an unfathomable black pool of chaos. Why is it that such an innocuous piece of cardboard with its triangular-shaped planchette holds the threat of becoming a force for evil? This was not a question that came to mind that late-night in the KTRS studios in St. Louis as I was hosting Coast to Coast AM back in 2002, filling in for the legendary Art Bell. I was taking calls, as usual, from listeners who had experienced their own encounters with the paranormal: ghosts of loved ones, voices offering help or consolation from the other side, cats or dogs whose behavior mysteriously foretold of danger, shadow people you could see just out of the corner of your eye, Big Foot, the giant bird, Mothman, UFOs of all shapes and sizes, and flying triangles. People were calling on open lines about abductions and other traumatic events that had shaped their lives. And then I told my audience about the Ouija board in the antique box. Should I use it on the air, I asked the listeners? Calls came pouring in, jamming the switchboard, the first-time caller line, and all the wildcard lines: "Do it!" I slid the Ouija board out of its box. Now, for anyone who has never seen the inside of a modern radio broadcast studio, the sight of so many switches, dials, flashing indicator lights, and phone hookups, all set around a table festooned with standing and hanging microphones and computer monitors for reading e-mail can be intimidating. On those very few occasions when I have hosted in-studio guests, I always tried to let them get acclimated to the array of equipment well before we went on the air so that there'd be no dead time between questions and answers in an interview because the overwhelming presence of technology had distracted a guest's attention. This amount of technology is comforting to me, because I know I'm hardwired into the rest of the universe. However, for every diode, switch, and electronic circuit there are probably a hundred things that will cause them to fail. That's why you have redundant and back-up systems and why you have a studio engineer as well as a producer backing you up and reading the dials to make sure the system's working the way it's supposed to. It's complicated, but it's only electronics. It's science. For every equipment failure, there's a physical reason. And for every failure there's a fix. That's what you learn on the job. That's what your engineer signals to you when a piece of equipment goes dead and you stare blankly through a glass window at the producer. That's what you have to rely on when nothing is coming through your earphones. On this particular night in St. Louis, amid the mass of electronics and blinking lights arrayed all around me like a nice warm security envelope, I unfolded the Ouija board and set it on the studio desk. I felt a hesitation. Should I or shouldn't I? The listener calls kept flooding in. Voices in my earphones were egging me on in front of a ten-million-person audience stretched almost 5,000 miles diagNoory, George is the author of 'Worker in the Light Unlock Your Five Senses And Liberate Your Limitless Potential', published 2006 under ISBN 9780765310873 and ISBN 0765310872.