Confessions of a Terranan Keeper, or, An Untrained Telepath is a Danger to Herself and Everyone Around Her

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Title:	Confessions of a Terranan Keeper, or, An Untrained Telepath is a Danger to Herself and Everyone Around Her
Creator:	Elisabeth Waters, and accompanying essay by Marion Zimmer Bradley
Date(s):	August 1982
Medium:	print
Fandom:	Darkover
Topic:
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Confessions of a Terranan Keeper, or, An Untrained Telepath is a Danger to Herself and Everyone Around Her is a 1982 essay by Elisabeth Waters. It includes an accompanying essay by Marion Zimmer Bradley. Bradley's essay was a part of her Letter from MZB series.

Both essays discuss the strong influence of fictional worlds, as well as their creators, on fans.

Bradley's introduction to Waters' essay, and to her own essay, addressed "the folly of trying to live a fantasy role in everyday life, and the way in which it can foul up your life, health, and physical and mental well-being."

They were printed in Darkover Newsletter #26.

Topics Discussed in Waters' Essay

• telepathy, laran (a Darkover term), psychic abilities
• amateur use of the above abilities
• fans influenced by Bradley's books, and other fans, and taking things too far in their personal lives and beliefs

• fans as misfits
• includes oversharing

Topics Discussed in Bradley's Essay

• women who take on Darkover names as a symbol of resisting oppression in their personal lives
• male fans, who after reading Darkover books, realize "they are attracted to people of their own sex"
• states that she has not been "proselytizing" in favor of homosexuality" or "urged anyone to turn homosexual"
• the dangers of fans, after reading Darkover books, thinking they are psychic, and play it as a game, that psychic work is very hard and painful and not a game
• Barney Miller, a 1970s comedy series about a police captain and his co-workers. One episode concerned a man who was possibly clairvoyant and telepathic, arrested for assaulting a man he'd overheard mentally planning a purse-snatching.
• a mention of the Sime~Gen fandom
• a plug for "professional" psychics with the recommendation of "Circle Network Newsletter"
• girls dressing up as Darkover characters for fun is okay, "as long as they are aware that it is a game and don't try to take it seriously and run ego-games and power-games on their sick-minded followers"
• "Do it for fun, and more power to you. Do it for genuine power, not shirking the serious ethical and spiritual training, and more power yet to you. But for the love of the Goddess, whether you call her Ceridwen, Isis or Avarra, don't take it up with the thought of getting personal power, amazing and impressing your friends, or letting your little ego run roughshod over your little pals, or you will find yourself In a kind of trouble you can't even imagine."

From Waters' Essay

I was twenty-three years old, and unusually backward for my age, when I discovered fandom. All my life I'd been different from everyone around me (having a high I.Q. and a school-teacher mother does not teach one to speak like one's peer group), and now, suddenly, there were other people like me and names for the things I had experienced. Suddenly I wasn't weird, I was special. I had laran, (Probably 99% of the population does, but I wasn't thinking of that then.) And since I was still a virgin, well, I must be a Keeper.

With the encouragement of similarly deluded and well-meaning friends, I started using my new-found powers. Within three months I was admitted to the emergency room of a hospital with a horrible case of what the doctor called a "hysterical reaction to an anxiety meurosis." It could also have been called "threshold sickness" or "changeover" or "vriamic fibrillations" or"contaminated channels." I had taken my mind, with its abilities, and caused a few changes in my body. Yes, you can do that. If you know what you're doing, you won't do it, because it is most emphatically not a good thing to do, but I didn't know any better. I was reading all these books about all these interesting people—most of whom were pretty ill themselves— and I was taking them as role models. It seems incredible now to me that I could have been so stupid, but I was.

If I'd known Marion then, she would have told me that I was being a stupid idiot and that I could do myself permanent injury, but I was living in Connecticut, and there was nobody to tell me what I was doing to myself. Over the next two years I did so much damage to my "channels"—and my immune system, and my endocrine system, that now, five years later, I still get sick at the least little thing.

[snipped, a lot of very personal information about personal health, allergies, and the inability to become pregnant and bear children that is blamed on the fan's careless "new-found" laran powers]

Why am I boring you with all of this? Because I have recently realized that I am not alone in my stupidity. There are other people out there "playing Keeper." "We're sorry about what happened to you," they say," but we know what we're doing." Well, I hope that they do, but I really doubt it. I thought I knew what I was doing, too. And part of me actually did, but it was the part of me that didn't like me very much, the part that didn't mind seeing me get hurt if it would make life more interesting.

So, if anybody out there is listening:

Yes, you too can be a Keeper, you can change the energy flows in your body and your environment; you can do all sorts of interesting things—but, please, DON'T!

It's not a game, it's real, and, depending on how intelligent you are and how much laran you have, you can wind up sick, in the hospital, in a mental hospital, or possibly dead. And none of it is any fun. Listen to me now, or find out for yourself later. The choice is yours.

From Bradley's Essay

Recently I have gotten into a vortex of people who seem to be trying to play out their Darkovan fantasy roles in real life.

Now, in some cases, this hasn't harmed anyone. A large number of women have changed their names legally to Free Amazon names and have simply become strong, self-sufficient young women, supporting themselves and breaking away from fathers, husbands or guardians who preferred to keep their daughters or wives unliberated; these young women have occasionally gone into training animals, learning martial arts, divorcing oppressive husbands or moving out of the houses of oppressive parents. I don't feel guilty about this. They would have done the same thing if their minds and imaginations had been gripped by any well-known best-selling work of feminism; that their growth toward personal freedom took the form of pretending, for a time, to be Darkovan Free Amazons, has not in any way inhibited their self-fulfilment.

In a few cases, some young people (mostly male, but one or two women seem to have had this experience too) after reading Heritage of Hastur, have decided, as Regis did in that book, that perhaps self-honesty, to the point they are attracted to people of their own sex, is the price they must pay for personal growth, that in cutting off their awareness of their own emotional nature, as did Regis for so long, they were also cutting off their true heritage of self-knowledge and truth. I am sure there are some people who do not approve of me because I have spoken out, loud and clear, the message that self-knowledge and self-acceptance is better than pretending to be something you are not. Some people may blame me for "proselytizing" in favor of homosexuality. I can only say that I have not urged that anyone turn homosexual if he is not (it's impossible anyway) but that if one IS homosexual or bisexual, it is always better to acknowledge it than to hide one's head from one's own true nature. Growth is always painful, but nothing ever came of lying to the self except grief.

But sometimes it really can be dangerous. If knowledge of psychic powers, whether it is called laran or something else, arises after reading the Darkover novels, that is usually a good thing. Unfortunately, there are people out there pretending to be Keepers, or perhaps deluded into thinking they ARE Keepers, when their psychic training would hardly fit them to be monitors. On this earth, it takes, conservatively speaking, seven or eight years to develop true psychism, and it MUST be done under the supervision of someone you can trust. Developing true psychism is a very different thing from suddenly discovering that you may have some latent psychic talents ; if you have these ESP potentials, there are ways to work on them and develop them, but when you start "building a circle" and trying to "focus other people's energies" or when you believe yourself to be under psychic attack, then you are playing silly-ass games. The best thing that can happen is that nothing will happen and you will keep pretending until you get tired of the game and take up Monopoly or Dungeons and Dragons. The worst thing that can happen is that you will stir up things In your own subconscious minds that will make unholy messes of everybody who comes around you. There is NO known way, at this time in 1982, to develop psychic powers overnight to the point where you could be put In charge of a circle, and I am very dubious about anyone who says it can EVER be done in this day and age; I have researched and studied these matters probably as well as anyone alive, and I tell you, kids, it cannot be done. There are probably not three people on this continent who have that kind of ESP power, and you can just bet they are not playing silly-ass games with kids who want to run power trips and ego games on each other.

Even on Darkover it takes about seven years of powerful AND PAINFUL training to make a Keeper -- and if you HAVE psychic powers, AND can find someone to train you, AND you don't blow your mental fuses halfway through the training AND you don't run into some crazy who is exploiting either your credulity or your latent psychism, it would probably take about that much time, seven or eight years, to get to the point where you could move the fall of a few pairs of dice or ward off somebody's "bad vibes" If he should for some unknown reason be trying to "attack you psychically."

Now, I have no special objection to girls in their teens dressing up in crimson gowns, AS A COSTUME, and calling themselves Keepers...as long as they are aware that it is a game and don't try to take it seriously and run ego-games and power-games on their sick-minded followers. I have no objection to people taking ESP seriously and trying to find out about it, whether they come to me for information, or to someone else. But when these people try to take it too seriously, and act as If they had already gained the power and authority of Keepers, and see psychic attackers under every bed —well, I react about the same way as I do to people who tell me in all seriousness that because they are Simes they don't need to eat, or that they change to werewolves at every full moon, and have to go out and howl. If they want to run around naked under the moon, I have no objection, provided they don't howl loudly enough to get arrested for disturbing the peace, and they don't catch cold running around in their wolfskin belts. (Did anyone see the episode of BARNEY MILLER about the man who came to the police station asking to be locked up because he was a werewolf and was about to change and kill somebody at the full moon?)

Come off It, people. If you are seriously interested In developing laran and psychic powers, there are reputable institutes that can help you --there is a publication called CIRCLE NETWORK NEWSLETTER which lists everybody In this country who is into magic, psychism, paganism and the Earth religions, and you can check out a few of them. There are dozens of books which purport to tell you how to develop your ESP—and if you get more than a few pages Into any of them, you'll learn that it is HARD, MIND-BREAKING W*O*R*K. But what it isn't, is something for kiddie games.

Do it for fun, and more power to you. Do it for genuine power, not shirking the serious ethical and spiritual training, and more power yet to you.

But for the love of the Goddess, whether you call her Ceridwen, Isis or Avarra, don't take it up with the thought of getting personal power, amazing and impressing your friends, or letting your little ego run roughshod over your little pals, or you will find yourself In a kind of trouble you can't even imagine.

I don't usually get serious in these pages. But, damn it, kids, there Is such a thing as Cause and Effect--Karma if you like. No, there will not be "punishment" unless eating green apples is "punished" by a tummy ache. And no green apple in the world is as hard on the body, mind and soul as ESP out of order.