A Pleasantville Prognosticator Predicted My Future; His Forecast Came True

By Adam Stone

Some of you might remember a column I prepared in early February about a Pleasantville-based astrologer, Colin McPhillamy, who predicted that I’d enjoy a once-in-a-lifetime creative experience on Apr. 20 of this year.

I was sure to publish McPhillamy’s forecast, and I wondered as the calendar ticked forward whether anything significant might be in store when the big day arrived.

In the piece, I mentioned how McPhillamy had already “revealed some personal and astonishingly accurate details about me.”

“I can (also) tell you something specific he referenced about my future – a transformative creative epiphany to unfold in a little more than two months from now, on precisely Apr. 20,” I wrote in the Feb. 5 piece. “He also foresees a new professional chapter for me to emerge in September 2025.”

As McPhillamy explained it, on Apr. 20, Jupiter and Uranus were to appear in the same part of the sky from our earthly perspective.

“And this is a very creative lineup, and it only happens every 14 years,” the former Londoner of Australian descent told me at the time, with his special brand of unpretentious sophistication.

The accomplished stage actor/writer-turned local astrologer emphasized how the cosmic arrangement would produce “the unexpected, the unforeseeable, the electrical, the awakening, the random, the revolutionary, the exciting, the creative.”

“So,” he added, “it’s a very creative moment that happens Apr. 20.”

In fact, by the time McPhillamy gave me the reading, my wife had already booked us a vacation with spa treatments for Apr. 20, along with my brother-in-law and sister.

R&R

Our long-awaited weekend retreat at Woodloch Lodge finally came, and on Friday, Apr. 19, I arrived at the vacation spot in the Poconos.

For a confluence of reasons, I was feeling extraordinarily tranquil. We were all relishing the getaway.

At one point the next morning, just before leaving a room in the lobby, a creative rush hit me like a thunderbolt, as a very specific idea for a creative project entered my mind, following funny banter with a friendly waiter about mixing breakfast potatoes with sweet potatoes for my morning meal.

“Loosen the reins,” the gregarious waiter had told me, after I wondered aloud about the double starch.

As soon as the vision hit, I started laughing to myself, realizing the date.

And I thought that was that.

Whether it was a self-fulfilling prophecy, or a more genuine one (or if reality manifests somewhere in the middle) a new, potent idea really did stir my soul on Apr. 20, and I discussed the general theme of the potential project throughout the day with my family.

But, as it turned out, the brainstorm was just a light creative appetizer foreshadowing a profoundly more impactful transformational feast scheduled for later in the afternoon.

Vacation Autopilot

When I arrived in the spa area that Saturday, I wasn’t giving any outward thought to the type of treatment we’d scheduled months earlier; the fact that it was still Apr. 20 was no longer at the forefront of my mind.

I was sort of on vacation autopilot.

Anyway, a nice young woman introduced herself to me, and directed me to a massage table.

I had a 90-minute Reiki session on the agenda.

For those who didn’t read it, I should quickly note here how I published a deep dive last November about the practice of Reiki (a century-old Japanese modality) and holistic healthcare more broadly. (The column referenced how people live to about 85 years old in Japan on average as compared to just over 76 in the United States, a staggering statistical gap linked to a variety of factors, including diet, societal stressors and medical access.)

New Wheelhouse

It’s also relevant to point out how I’ve been conducting something of a spiritual investigation (journalistically and personally) ever since our digital editor and my late friend Robert Schork died suddenly at 51 last May.

Since then, I’ve written about local near-death experiences, Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, and other eye-opening, traditionally inexplicable claims.

In fact, until typing the last paragraph, I didn’t realize the week this column is running happens to mark the one-year anniversary of Robert’s passing, as he died of a heart attack on May 20, the same date as the digital publication date of this piece.

Admittedly, it feels a tad uncomfortable to deploy the phrase “spiritual investigation.”

But that’s just what this has been for me, including when I spoke with a medium who summoned Robert to me both by name, as well as through astounding private details such as an obscure inside joke we shared in a mind-bending, still confounding encounter from this past summer, as I described for an earlier piece.

Here’s the thing: I come from a pretty analytical, sober-minded, fact-based background, and much of this new-age language still remains somewhat uncomfortable, outside my historic, sort of Spock-like wheelhouse, more at home with tightly-wound Western logic.

Yet I’ve become keenly interested in exploring that subtle space where the outer boundaries of established science and spiritual insights might converge, and the elegant logic that resides within ancient, Eastern traditions like Buddhism in deconstructing the non-material world. (Not to mention Western philosophers like Pythagoras, from the sixth century B.C., who delved into the realm of past lives, and, separately, the mysticism planted within the roots of Judeo-Christian beliefs.)

So bear with me.

Purple Haze

I parked myself on the massage table, on my back, and the Reiki practitioner explained more about the practice, and related data points, noting the definition of the various chakras – energy centers within the body – including the crown and the third eye, a pair of areas near the top of our biological shells.

She then hovered her hands near my body, without any touch, and began to channel and transfer the energy.

Yet I wasn’t really thinking much about the whole thing, and just felt deeply relaxed, in a way that actually helped capture for me how much stress we usually carry with us, stuffing pain deep inside our bodies.

But then, all of a sudden, I saw purple hues.

That’s a sentence I never thought I’d utter, and I wouldn’t really have known what it meant before Apr. 20.

Yet that’s precisely what happened.

Reiki experts, I later learned, say that seeing purple symbolizes an awakening, intuitive insight, and, yes, a surge of creativity – my crown and my mind’s eye, both associated with shades of purple, were opening and expanding.

In my consciousness, I soaked in a radiant, pulsating, multi-shaded blast of the color.

And guess what?

I haven’t even arrived at the wildest part yet.

360 Degrees

As I experienced the purple, I also felt energy around me buzzing pleasantly, subtly, warmly.

I felt weightless, enjoying the entire episode, when the reality-altering aspect of the encounter began to unfold.

All of a sudden, I felt my right arm moving slowly, deliberately, one “click” at a time, in what would ultimately be a 360-degree machine-like rotation.

It was as if I was a Warner Brothers cartoon character, with a mechanical limb, and it was being recalibrated into a looser, more creative formation, preparing for a large project.

The whole thing felt just really nice.

Then it was onto my left arm’s turn for healing, and release.

However, all of a sudden, about 180 degrees into my left arm’s circular rotation, it struck me that what I was feeling in my arm was not a feeling I’d ever experienced before.

The abnormality was really dawning on me now.

With my eyes still closed, and feeling deeply relaxed, I asked the practitioner if she’d been touching and twisting my arms.

No, of course not, she replied.

She wasn’t touching me at all. She hadn’t touched me once.

It was all just part of a creative opening up of my soul, she explained.

I understood exactly what she meant, even though her sentiment would have sounded like a foreign language if expressed to me as recently as last spring.

Mind-Body Connection

This next part might be too much for hardened debunkers, but, in my view, I was absorbing the subtle whispers of something metaphysical; one might say that deeper levels of consciousness are inherently divine.

That said, there are also infinite aspects of the encounter I do not understand, in a way I find incredibly exciting.

When I’d met with McPhillamy in his Memorial Plaza office in Pleasantville for a more formal reading shortly after my February piece about him was published, he also confirmed how April and May looked like award-winning months for me, with professional distinction in the looming stars.

I subsequently won seven honors for my 2023 reporting from a pair of journalism organizations (the New York Press Association and the Silurians Press Club) during that time frame, largely for my work investigating the disease of corporate sick care.

Examiner Media also has an unrelated big application opportunity pending with a national news organization, with the scheduled results announcement just a few days away as May winds down.

It’s important to emphasize how I maintain approximately a zillion questions for every loose answer I’ve vaguely discovered around spiritual topics during my various inquiries.

Our understanding of this complex world remains constrained by the limits of human cognitive development. But my intuitive muscles are strengthening.

The past two weekends, for instance, I tried Thai yoga massage for the first time with local practitioner Julia Mondello of Quantum Healing & Wellness in Bedford Hills.

That experience helped me better understand the clinically proven, unambiguously real mind-body connection.

I gained additional insight over how preventive Eastern care helps foster healthier, happier lives, as Mondello masterfully stretched my body into better alignment, loosening my hamstrings, my psoas muscles and my mental reins.

‘The Exciting, the Creative’

As for access to this type of holistic healthcare, it doesn’t require any hefty bills.

Just last Wednesday, while working from home, I took a break from newspapering to listen to a 10-minute guided meditation, courtesy of Alexa, and glittering images again entered my consciousness, for the second time in my life.

Overall, I’m mostly just humbled and awe-struck by the vastness of the great unknown.

But, on at least some level, Apr. 20 most definitely came true for me.

You don’t need to subscribe to (or be well-schooled in) astrological explanations to believe in the power of the human mind to forge expansive, majestic new realities.

What I saw and felt on Apr. 20 was most definitely, in McPhillamy’s prophetic words, “the unexpected, the unforeseeable, the electrical, the awakening, the random, the revolutionary, the exciting, the creative.”

Closing Arguments

And now I’m bracing myself for the Pleasantville prognosticator’s prediction about my next professional chapter, set for September of next year, as free will and destiny are apparently poised to converge in that month to unlock a new door while allowing Examiner Media to still flourish under my guidance.

In navigating any path of discovery, believers and non-believers alike can embrace the sublime wonders of the universe.

That process seems to neatly align with realizing that life isn’t quite a haphazard series of events.

It’s more like a grand, collective puzzle, where fate and choice intertwine, nudging us toward our true calling, if we listen mindfully enough, requiring no fidelity to mysterious astrological revelations.

In this chaotic, fractured, beautiful world, gaining some of this perspective helps deliver much-needed grounding and balance.

So go “loosen the reins.”

Expanded consciousness awaits, even for the secular-minded.

Publisher Adam Stone founded Examiner Media in 2007.