Chapter 74: Kouche

Tamara stopped to marshal her thoughts. “First, I asked Mom this question too,” she went on. “Have you had a chance to practice projecting any emotion to see how it works with others?”

Greta nodded. “Yes, but I feel uncomfortable doing that. It’s a dangerous ability, I think, and I don’t want to misuse it.”

“That’s almost exactly what Mom told me,” Tamara said, “and it’s why I trusted you with that knowledge. What have you done so far?”

“Ah, once, at a faculty meeting, two of the professors began disagreeing about a policy we were discussing and I could tell that one of them felt that the proposed policy was somehow threatening—maybe to his research interests. I caught his eye and projected ‘calm’ to him.”

“Oh, cool. What happened?”

“He stopped his almost shouting and sat, then apologized. It looked like he was thinking. A minute later, he asked to speak again and this time made a very reasonable suggestion. My new sense of empathy suggested to me that he had come to the meeting with a preconceived notion and an oppositional attitude. The calming I sent him helped him reconsider his ideas.”

Tamara smiled. “See, now that was a perfect use and how you did that showed a fine touch. Sending too strong a calming emotion can cloud someone’s thinking.”

“Yes, I can see that. Oh, another instance. Two grad assistants were unhappy with their teaching assignments. Each worked for a different faculty member. This was almost amusing since one TA felt that she was being taken advantage of—her prof actually did have her doing more than her required work; while the other complained that he had too little to do and was getting no benefit from his TA assignment.

“So I met with the faculty members involved. Ah, separately, of course. Both were defensive and not receptive to logical reasoning. So you know the inverse of the ‘truth sense’? Projecting ‘truth’? I guess you could call that persuasion. I used that and to my delight, it mostly worked. Although neither one agreed on the spot to change the way they used their TAs, they both did agree to discuss their TA jobs with them. I later heard that both TAs were satisfied with the accommodations.”

“Nice. It’s good to use gentle persuasion that way. I’ve used compulsion—mainly for my protection—and the target always seems to have a lingering emotion of resentment and nowhere to direct that resentment. Now here’s what I want to discuss with you; it’s about what I’m planning to do in Haiti. The biggest problem that I see right now is two-fold; the personal security of the people who’ll be working on my projects, and both their truthfulness and that of the government’s officials we’ll need to work with.”

“Certainly the latter is something not unique to Haiti,” Greta observed. “I know of this problem existing in many cultures.”

“That’s true. I guess that’s a common problem in economically disadvantaged countries.”

“Others as well. The problem exists in countries with oppressive or totalitarian governments too.”

“Sure, I can see that. So what I thought of is this: To counter Haiti’s security problem, which was caused by a too small and ineffective police force, the idea is to bring in experienced outside security. Forces from Benin, Togo, or Nigeria, whose people have similar cultures. They would work with the Haitian security people, but to avoid corruption, I’d like to have some form of screening to ferret out any problem personnel, especially Haitians. I can’t do all of that myself, obviously. So I thought we might be able to train manbos as screeners for the new police force that will be built. Do you think that this is feasible? ethical?”

“Ethical? I don’t see any problem with that, but I’m not sure about feasability. What’s your idea about training people? When you worked with Werner and me, that took about ten minutes and you looked a bit drained afterwards.”

“Okay, I had something a bit different in mind. When I first figured out how to activate a person’s limbic system, my first subject after Peter was a woman whose husband had a severe psychological problem. Remember? I mentioned that to you—last summer, I think.”

“You showed her something to help keep her husband grounded in reality, as I recall.”

“Yep. And you said that teaching how to do that would cause a revolution in psychiatry. But fully activating the limbic system takes a huge mental effort, even if the person already has some of the system active, like a spiritually trained person. Like a manbo, for example. Here’s what I figured out. I had to give that woman a certain amount of projecting ability, so that needed to involve a partner. Even so, it only took twenty or thirty seconds to do it and that unlocked her ability enough to help her husband. I’m sure that I could activate a truth sense in a receptive person by myself alone, pretty quickly, and I’m certain that you can as well, given your skills now.”

“You really think so?”

“Sure. And I have a likely subject, Claire.”

Greta looked at her doubtfully.

Claire was at first dubious too, but when Peter told his mom about how he could sense that someone was lying, she agreed to be a guinea pig for Greta. Peter went off to find Tamara to tell her that his mom had agreed.

“So far Tamara’s the only one who can unlock the ability in others,” Greta told Claire. “Now she’s trying to see if that’s an ability that others can unlock. Being a human lie detector is useful for a teacher and it works much simpler than the complicated cheating detection one of my colleagues in economics pulled off last term.”

“Oh? What’s that?” Claire asked. “At the Academy we do have occasional cheating incidents but they’re rare. We’ve got a strong code of honor, after all.”

“This was a clever stunt,” Greta told her. “The instructor suspected that some of the students in his class were using their smartphones to cheat because during exams, lots more would take bathroom breaks than during regular classes. So he set up an elaborate ruse. A few weeks before the final, he had his TA post a carefully worded question to an answer site that most college kids use for looking up questions. The question posed a supply-and-demand situation for which there was no valid definitive answer. A week later, the instructor visited the site and submitted a fake answer, one that actually failed to answer the question, but its wording and citation of a specific economic principle made it appear like a reasonable answer.

“On the day of the exam, more than a dozen of the kids took a bathroom break. And lo and behold, most of those students had regurgitated the instructor’s planted fake answer to his question. There was absolutely no way that they could have come up with that answer on their own; the economic principle he had cited on the answer site was bogus. So those students were given a zero on the exam and were reported to the dean for cheating.”

“That’s genius,” Claire agreed. “But what about the honest ones? If there was no answer, wouldn’t that have penalized them?”

“He gave full credit to any of the attempted answers—even to those who skipped the question. He only penalized those whom he had trapped if they had used the unique answer only available on that particular website. Ah, here’s Tamara. What do we do now, Tamara?”

“Thanks for helping Greta, Claire,” Tamara told her. “And you’ll like having the ability.”

“We’ll see. Peter says it’s been useful for him. What do we do?”

“Greta gets to do all the work. You just need to relax and kinda let your mind go—don’t think about anything in particular. Greta, we’ll meditate together and you know how to try to sense another’s aura? We’ve done that before. Hold Claire’s hand and meditate with me. You’ll feel a kind of different emotion that I’ll try to open in your limbic system; it has a ‘green’ sensation. When you sense that ‘green,’ feeling, try projecting it to Claire. Let’s start.”

On the first attempt, Greta’s concentration faltered.

“Greta, don’t try forcing,” Tamara suggested. “You’re tensing up. Just relax and let it flow.”

After a little more than twenty seconds after Greta relaxed, Claire gasped slightly.

“Jesus! That was ... I don’t know what...” she gasped.

“What did it feel like?” Tamara asked.

“Indescribable. Almost like my mind opened to the whole universe and suddenly it was gone.”

“Cool! Excellent!” Tamara gushed. “You must have sensed the entire gestalt of the energies that pervade the world. I believe that there’s actually information in that energy too. Maybe Greta unlocked more than just a lie-sensitivity in you; that was a little unexpected.”

“Is that a problem?” Claire asked uncertainly.

“Oh, no. Not at all,” Tamara reassured her. “You might have become somewhat more empathic. You must have at least some talent ‘cause Peter has half of your genes.”

Meanwhile Greta was looking a bit dazed. “So it worked? You felt something change in your head, then.”

Claire nodded. “Definitely. So how do we test it? One of you tell me a lie?”

Tamara chuckled. “It doesn’t really work like that, so that’s not a good test. Artificial lies—ones told deliberately—don’t produce the physiological changes that an actual lie does. By the same token, you can’t really tell someone’s lying over the phone or video using that sense. The empathic lie-detecting sense works just like sensing a person’s other emotions. Think of how a lie-detector device works; that device measures the body’s physiological changes triggered by the limbic system but needs a trained person to interpret all the device’s data together.

“Some people can detect lies from body language—they notice the mouth may tighten, the eye pupils contract, the eye blinking becomes more deliberate. The body shows the stress too with shallow breathing, raised shoulders, and even some hand and arm movements. All those body changes are responses to stress and your new sense detects them and interprets them as showing stress, therefore, a lie.”

Greta and Claire looked at each other and shrugged. “Thus Tamara speaks,” Greta chuckled and the two began laughing, hugging each other.

“What’d I say?” Tamara asked, confused.

“Tamara, the breadth of your knowledge is simply astounding,” Claire told her, “and don’t put it off by saying that you like to read a lot. Yes, you do read, but you have a unique ability to synthesize new information from widely different sources and create your own vision to see what others miss.”

“Well then, it appears that Tamara’s idea of giving other sensitive people new empathic abilities was a success, pending the result of your testing it, Claire,” Greta said. “Tamara had an idea of teaching up a cadre of manbos as screeners for an improved Haitian police force. Weed out any bad actors, real or potential.”

“Yes. That’s what Peter had told me she wanted to do and my volunteering could help,” Claire commented.

Tamara was pleased that her idea worked. She knew that Greta had an extremely strong spirituality, stronger than her mother’s, so she was happy to learn that she had the ability to teach others to activate some limbic system functions. The next step was to show her mother how to do this; her idea was that her mother would have a close relationship with the manbos she was recruiting for her social project and therefore could teach them the skill. But as a safeguard, Tamara decided to show her mother how to plant a subconscious suggestion with the skill to ensure that it wouldn’t be used for evil purposes.

She also wanted to talk with Nadine about her planned kouche. She had made time in her schedule to take ten days for it in early October.

Mid-September

“Manman, I had told you that from part of Granmanman’s memories, that in order to understand my abilities more, that I would need to do kouche. I certainly know that I haven’t been kanzo and that my initiation will not follow the tradition. But my strong feeling is that I must isolate completely and can’t do it where I can sense people. Even when I’m in the resort’s natural areas, I can sense emotional auras.”

“Yes, we did discuss this. Where can you go?”

“I’ve found some rentals of very remote cabins in western Virginia and in West Virginia too, in the mountains there. I’m planning ten days. Two for travel and one to get ready. Then seven days of meditation. I think baths will be possible in nearby streams.”

“In the mountains? That will be cold.”

Tamara nodded. “I know. But the kouche isn’t about comfort, is it. Can you tell me something about the traditional kouche so I can adapt what I’ll need to do?”

“You’re really doing this, darling. All right. In many ounfòs, there’s a small room called the djévò where the initiate is sequestered for the duration of the kouche. Some traditions call for eight days, some nine.”

“Granmanman’s memory suggests seven ‘cause I’ll have no community support.”

“I see. Interesting. You’re supposed to have an asson with you, a generic one. It might not be the one you’re presented with when the initiation is complete.”

“Since I won’t actually become a manbo, I won’t need the asson.”

“True. The kanzo wears a white tunic, follows a special diet that’s salt-free, and sleeps on a mat on the floor. In my case, Manman gave me a flat stone to use as a pillow. During the seclusion, there’s one particular important ritual, the lav tèt. That’s a washing of the head in preparation for the lwa to enter. The washing is believed to remove the gwo-bôn-nanj, one of the two parts of the human soul, the part having a divine origin, and this makes space for the lwa to enter and create the new soul. The other part of the soul, the ti-bôn-nanj, which is one’s personality and conscience, remains.”

“So the lwa becomes part of the manbo’s soul?” Tamara asked.

“Our belief is that the lwa with which the initiate has the greatest affinity creates the new soul, allowing the new manbo to speak to and hear from the lwa. This gives her the ability to interpret the advice given by the lwa to specific individuals or groups.”

“What’s involved in the lav tèt?”

“That varies by the sosyete and who’s involved, but for the kanzo, it’s typically done early in the morning. An amount of water containing certain herbs and other ingredients, recipes for which are usually secrets of each sosyete, is prepared and consecrated. In my case, it was done seven times. After wrapping a white kerchief around my head, I spent the remainder of the day lying on my mat, which was on the floor and covered with a white sheet, meditating.”

“Ah, this is interesting,” Tamara said. “The symbolism is clear; this ritual is almost exactly analogous to Christian baptism. The water purifies and cleanses the soul to allow for the presence of the Trinity to be embraced by the initiate. I read that Hindus make pilgrimages to bathe in holy rivers or streams, and other religions have similar practices, like Islam, Judaism, and Buddhism.”

Nadine smiled at Tamara. “You’re quite correct, my genius child. My studies of anthropology show how these practices are related, too. The symbology of water was a powerful totem in many primitive cultures and with the growth of organized religions, the practices became formalized. So I’m guessing that you’ll try to incorporate a lav tèt in some form in your kouche?”

“I will. That part seems to me to be important for some reason.”

“You’ll be alone in a remote region. Will you be safe? I’m concerned about this, honey. And you said that your electronics will be off.”

“I’ll be safe. Remember my ability. And being so far from people, I’ll be able to sense anyone coming close. But it’s very important that I not have any real-world distractions.”

“Yes, that’s true for the traditional kouche also,” Nadine agreed. “When will you leave?”

“I’m planning on a full week, from a Friday to the following Sunday, ten days. First full week of October.”

They spoke for a while longer, Nadine telling Tamara some details about her own kanzo experiences.

“But I can’t say anything about what happens in the djévò,” Nadine told her. “It’s forbidden to discuss those things with non-initiates. Not that anything bad or naughty happens,” she chuckled, “it’s just not done and many believe that the lwa punish violators.”

“That’s cool, what I’m doing is kinda distant from the tradition,” Tamara said.

“But it works for you. I still recall my Sunday phone call to you, several years ago, after you paid an unexpected visit to the spiritual crossroads as a non-initiate. You’re a trail-blazer—in many more ways than just in Vodou, darling.”