Go Ahead, Shame me!

I remember a heated discussion with a guy whom I admired for his wit and creativity. He made his money being a DJ in a gay club, but he'd honed his skills and made an extremely respectable living. I am unsure of what he’d done to get educated, but he was obviously bright and could put a sentence together. In a public discussion he bemoaned his slight understanding of Numerology which would have obviously pointed to the correct decision. I probably--no assuredly--said something derogatory about relying on Assyrian soothsaying to arrive at a rational conclusion, and he angrily accused me of “Number shaming.” These were the heady days of politically correct lingo when you couldn’t call a fat drag queen fat, even if she called herself Fat Fanny, but what I remember most was his indignant anger that I called into question magical numbers as a way to truth.

One of the early proponents of the Hoffman Quadrinity Process was the Psychic Lady Sonia Choquette. She would apparently go into a trance state, connect with her guides on the supernatural plane, and give you advice. I checked her website and she is still selling--for $1200 she will give you an hour session over the phone. (I didn't make the mistake of adding a zero. That is more than the price of an Air France round trip ticket from San Francisco to Paris). No one is going to believe me if I warn them that they’re being scalped, but I was more interested in something that I saw in one of Choquette’s early online bio’s. What does someone say about his or her credentials for the Mystic Arts? Choquette claimed that she studied at the Sorbonne. I couldn’t stop laughing. I went and checked to see if there was even a course or two on comparative mysticism in the curriculum. Nothing. Maybe she'd been taking basic French and was tripping out in the back row rather than paying attention to the proper use of the ellipsis. Either that or she concocted the verification of her abilities from one of the most respected Universities in Europe,

Bob Hoffman originally called his Process, The Fisher-Hoffman Process of Psychic therapy. There it is right in the name.  A psychic is a person who claims to use extrasensory perception to identify information hidden from the normal senses, particularly involving telepathy or clairvoyance, or who performs acts that are apparently inexplicable by natural laws, such as psychokinesis or teleportation. 

If you knew Hoffman, trusting him for information that is normally hidden is a stretch of the imagination. Probably the only way to accept it is to say “apparently inexplicable by natural laws.” Or you can trust professional psychotherapy. 

Apparently the Hoffman Institute agrees with me. They have completely removed any mention of Hoffman's psychic abilities. I think that the narrative is to portray Hoffman as a kindly Jewish grandfather. “Gifted Intuitive” is substituted for psychic, 

Ms. Choquette now calls herself a “six-sensory consultant” whatever that means. Go ahead accuse me of “psychic shaming.” Is Fat Fanny going to punch me out? At least she was being honest.