Chapter 6, "Life is Like a Bank Account"
Joyce and I became instant friends. She and I communicated on a depth I had never experienced with another person prior to meeting her. She was 45 years older than I was, and so the relationship was always platonic. Although I came to her as a student, she always treated me with a respect that transcended who I am in this life. She was and remains the most remarkable person I've ever met. Her strength of character and personality were formidable, and one sensed this in her presence. Yet conversely her depths of humbleness and humility were always surprising to me. She was born in Ohio and grew up in Illinois and Wisconsin. She and her husband, a school teacher, came to the west coast of Florida in the early 1920s. (he died in the mid-'70s) They raised four successful children of their own and thirteen foster children. She did this in a day and time when there weren't social service agencies and the like, so she received no financial remuneration of any kind. The thirteen children were kids that one way or another found their way to Joyce. She always found a way to feed and clothe them, and make room for them in the little wood-frame house that I found her in. The list of people she had helped through the years in this community was amazing. I met all four of her children and got to know several of them fairly well. She was in so many ways the Mother Teresa of this area and truly walked her talk of her spiritual beliefs. Some of her exploits that Joyce wouldn't tell me about, but one of her sons and daughter did, was that Joyce stood up to the KKK in this area long before others had the courage to do so. She also built the first coin-operated laundry in this area and was the driving force to get educators elected to the local school board, rather than the local businessmen who didn't know much about running schools.
Joyce was an example of service-to-others and practiced the unconditional love that Christ talked about. The unusual part was that she was totally turned off by organized religions. Like me, she had broken away from the guilt, fire and brimstone that so many churches offer. She studied spirituality and metaphysics her entire life, along with astrology. I didn't know until she died eleven years later, and found out when her children published her obituary, that Joyce held a doctorate in philosophy and humanities from a prominent Florida University. That was just like Joyce; she no doubt didn't want me to feel uncomfortable or intimidated conversing with her.
Her relationship with God, which she preferred to refer to in a broader definition as the word "Spirit", was a close one. Let me explain her use of the word Spirit that I too chose to adopt years ago, and which I use frequently in this book. Joyce recognized, as I do, that there is a Divine Power or Force that is the Creator of all things. She, like me, preferred to call God the Creator. Most of the time she would use the word Spirit, which in her way of thinking, was God plus all of his subordinates/hierarchy such as angels/spirit guides. I also ended up adopting her term of Spirit.
Joyce was a brilliant woman who formed her own opinions even when they were counter to the mainstream thought of her day. She was a voracious reader of everything she could get her hands on that pertained to spirituality. She was an ordained minister of a church called the Universal Church of the Master, of San Leandro, California, but in eleven years time, I never heard her refer to herself as a reverend and never saw her use the title. She told me the only reason that she got ordained was so that she could go into the local jails and prisons to help people. She told me that the authorities here in Florida back in the '30s and '40s harassed metaphysical people for doing any counseling if they weren't an ordained reverend affiliated with a church. Joyce never charged anyone for her help or counseling her entire life. In fact, she wasn't very keen on those that did. Her attitude was that if a psychic, for instance, had a "gift," he or she should share it as much as possible. She recognized they needed an income to support themselves, and said that they should charge modest amounts, or take a love offering. A love offering means the person pays what they can afford or thinks the service was worth.
Joyce was a walking encyclopedia of spiritual knowledge and was friends with and knew just about everybody in the spiritual/metaphysical community here in the Tampa Bay area since the mid 20s. One of her friends, who had died years earlier, was a local psychic named Harriet who often assisted the local police in solving the unsolved crimes that they couldn't. My first knowledge that negative entities most likely actually existed for real came early on in my mentoring when Joyce told me about a conversation that Joyce had with Harriet many years earlier. Joyce told me that Harriet volunteered to her that she thought that the entity that kept coming to her, that Harriet channeled in order to solve crimes for the police, and do "readings" for people, probably wasn't a positive entity. Harriet never did tell Joyce the exact reasons why she thought it was a negative entity, but she did tell Joyce that she believed it wasn't positive, and was truly baffled that if indeed it was a negative entity as she thought it was, "Why would it help her help the police solve crimes?"
At the time I heard this story from Joyce I didn't pay too much attention to it. Years later, after Joyce too had passed on, I got the answer that Harriet was seeking. I believe that Harriet was correct in believing or knowing that the entity she was bringing in was a negative, but the real reason that this entity assisted Harriet solve crimes was because by doing so, word of mouth about Harriet spread around the community with each solved crime, and because of this, Harriet never lacked for paying customers for her readings. In other words, the negative entity saw that by doing a good thing in assisting Harriet solve crimes that the negative entity could then reach more people that Harriet was reading, and do its harm to these individuals. This is done by the negative entity gaining the trust of people that Harriet was reading by supplying the specific information for Harriet to pass on to them. The people being read by Harriet were requesting specific information about jobs, health issues, their love lives and numerous other subjects. After a negative entity gains the confidence of the person being read, and this sometimes can take years, the negative entity will intentionally give false or misleading information that often could ruin people's lives, or in worst case scenarios, cause these people to take their own lives. If you recall the tell tale signs I list at the beginning of this website, you will recall that whenever a psychic or channel gives out specific information designed to solve an individual's problems, it is a violation of that person's free will, and thus the sign that the source is a negative source. More about this later on in the book.
One of the remarkable things about Joyce is that she never tried in the slightest to steer or guide my spiritual studies in any form whatsoever in all the years we were close friends. She always waited for me to express an interest in something first. When I first met Joyce, one of the burning questions I'd had for several years at that time, was where did Christ go from the age of thirteen or so, to his early thirties? One of the first books that Joyce suggested I read was The Lost Years of Jesus Revealed, by the Rev. Dr. Charles Francis Potter. This little paperback published in 1958 was, and remains today, a real eye-opener and served to give me some of the answers that I was seeking after I left the fundamentalist church. In this book Potter talks about the Jews who preceded Christ, known as the Essenes, who are credited with having written the Dead Sea Scrolls. Although there have been numerous books written about the Dead Sea Scrolls, I find Dr. Potter's no-frills early edition to be on the money, and in plain English. If Christ was not an Essene, or taught by them, then at the very least, they and their "Teacher of Righteousness" influenced him. Space doesn't permit me to go into every aspect of this awesome little book, but if you ever suspected that the Bible has been tampered with intentionally by humankind, then I suggest that you read this book. You won't be disappointed. Dr. Potter names what was added and deleted from the Bible, the date, places, and by whom, and all the information he cites can be found in other sources and easily verified as accurate.
Joyce spent most of the hours in her day in her 80's praying and meditating. Towards the beginning of our relationship I got an idea of just how well she was able to manifest things. To manifest something is to put forth a prayer or affirmation to Spirit, or God, or whatever name you find comfortable to refer to the Divine Force in the Universe. In this prayer or affirmation, you state what you want to have happen, and then expect it to happen. The "expecting" it to happen is having faith that it will take place. A few years after meeting and knowing Joyce, I started to date a woman that I would end up being with for seven years. When she and I first started dating we would go out to eat at local restaurants, every weekend, in the middle of the tourist season here. Now, if you are a native and live on the Gulf in west Florida and choose to go to certain restaurants that the tourists go to during tourist season, you know you will have to hunt for parking and have a very long wait to be seated. Well, that just wasn't happening to me and my new romantic interest. Every week we would go out to eat, and lo and behold, a parking place would appear out of nowhere right at the front door. Instead of a long wait, tables would seemingly appear to open up out of nowhere. This was going on for months and completely baffling the two of us until one day when we had Joyce over for dinner. Joyce, with a smile on her face and a twinkle in her eyes, asked us after dinner if we were having any luck finding parking places when we went out to eat on the weekends. In a flash we both knew she was responsible for our remarkable and unexplained streak of good luck! She said she was just trying to make things easier for us, and indeed she had done so. Her thoughtful actions and ability to make things happen really had a profound impact on my thinking about the power that we hold in our minds!
Shortly after realizing that Joyce was the one responsible for these parking and restaurant seating miracles, I wanted to learn to manifest things too. I bought the books As a Man Thinketh by James Allen, a book that was written in 1902 and Think and Grow Rich by Napolean Hill, a book written in the '30s. These two books showed me how to create my own parking spaces and other things in life, and I still recommend both of them today. One interesting point I learned about the faith component of manifesting something is this: whenever your mind has a doubt enter it regarding the thing that you're trying to manifest, replace that doubt immediately with a simple, "Thank you God for..." and then name the item. (You can use the word Spirit, Divine Power, Creator or whatever you're comfortable calling God, and it will work just as well)
As I stated earlier, Joyce never had a regimen of teaching me spirituality; she would present lessons and information to me as the opportunities made themselves available, and then would answer my questions as I presented them to her. For example, one day in the late '80s I was sitting at home watching TV when I looked across the street and noticed an elderly neighbor attempting to change a flat tire on his car. I got up and walked across the street and offered to help. The neighbor was thrilled that I was changing his tire, because the job was really a bit more than he was able to do at his advanced age. It only took a few minutes for me to put his spare tire on his car so that he could drive down to the tire store and have his flat tire fixed. As I started back across the street to where I lived, the neighbor and his wife both thanked me for my help. If they hadn't thanked me it wouldn't have bothered me very much, as I was just glad to be able to help, and besides, I had spent only about ten minutes of my time changing the neighbor's tire at that. Later on that day I told Joyce about changing that neighbor's tire which was an opportunity for Joyce to tell me her "Life is like a bank account" theory. She told me that back in the '30s, when she was working as a bookkeeper at a local bank, a strong thought/message had come to her. She said that every time you help someone you make a deposit for your soul, and that every time you harm someone or something, you make a withdrawal from your soul's account. Naturally, at the end of your life you want to have more deposits than withdrawals. "So, Peter," she said to me, In reality, you should be thankful for the opportunity for changing your neighbor's tire, because it gave you the opportunity to make a deposit for your soul." She of course was as usual totally right, and in an instant I recognized that what she had said was completely profound! It was several years later that I recognized that what she was talking about was a system of service-to-others. This, of course, was one of the main concepts that Christ, Buddha, and others have tried to teach to humanity.
Joyce also turned me on to the writings of, and about, Edgar Cayce. She felt that Cayce was honest and accurate when he gave messages to humankind. In her opinion, he was tuned into the Akashic record (a record in the Universe of all things that have ever taken place or are likely to take place in our future that is available to all souls who are beyond Earth's veil), something I would find confirmed years later in The Law of One material. Like everything else, she waited for me to find Cayce on my own, and then patiently waited for me to ask my own questions. That's how it was with all the things she taught me. She strongly believed in the individual's right of free will and never tried to push any beliefs on to me. It just wasn't her nature to do so.
Joyce died on October 12, 1992 at almost 91 years of age. Although she was my best friend, and irreplaceable in my life, she and I were glad that she died when she did. The quality of her life deteriorated rapidly in the last six months of her life. She had a series of small strokes that made it difficult for us to communicate. Just shortly before she died, she told me she was ready and that she had her "bags packed." She said she would reserve a seat alongside of her on the switchboard upstairs for me. She used to jokingly say that she could picture the two of us working side by side as guides on that switchboard. Joyce always had a great sense of humor and never took herself too seriously. Regardless of who or what I am, or may ever be as a soul, I know that I have been blessed to have been loved and guided by her in my lifetime. I can never thank her enough for all that she did for me and taught me.