Inside the Berkeley Psychic Institute

'Energy,' Satanism, and recovery

Terminal Belief is a series examining fringe cults and the occult, religious movements, apocalyptic subcultures, and the spread of “end-times” thinking in America. It combines original investigations, archival research, and on-the-ground reporting to track how marginal belief systems influence politics, culture, and everyday life. The project describes what happens when WitchTok becomes more popular than Jesus. It situates cults and conspiracy-driven groups within the broader story of American decline, offering both deep context and accessible storytelling.

Candice Charles was fourteen years old when she first closed her eyes at the Berkeley Psychic Institute. A voice instructed her to imagine a television screen in front of her face. Then came the central instruction: picture a cord extending from the base of her spine down through the floor, through the earth’s crust, all the way to the planet’s molten center.

“You make a grounding cord and let the energy fall out,” she recalls. “You sit, close your eyes, and run your energy.”

The first time felt disorienting. She didn’t know what they were talking about. But she was excited to be there. Candice had just moved in with her uncle in Dixon, California, after leaving an unstable home. Her uncle was the kind of person who tried things — he’d dabbled in Scientology for a while, always curious about the fringe. The Berkeley Psychic Institute appealed to him, and when he brought his teenage niece along to a class in Sacramento, she was instantly receptive.

“I was so excited because I grew up in a small town,” she says. “My parents were always on hard times. They never got to experience anything.”

The Institute had been founded in the early 1970s by Lewis S. Bostwick, a former watchmaker and jeweler who reinvented himself as a spiritual entrepreneur. According to writer Richard Grossinger, Bostwick “brought together a blend of Hindu, Buddhist, theosophical, and shamanic wisdom and training methods with the unadulterated essence of early human potential movement gambits like EST and Dianetics/Scientology.” The resulting curriculum treated clairvoyance not as a supernatural gift but as a teachable skill, something that could be systematized and practiced like meditation or yoga.

By the time Candice arrived in the mid-1990s, BPI had been operating for more than two decades. It occupied a bland institutional space — folding chairs, cubicle walls, fluorescent lighting. “I half-expected it to be a kitschy throwback with beaded doorways and barefoot mystics,” wrote one visitor in 2014. “Instead, it looks more like an accounting firm.” This aesthetic plainness was part of the Institute’s character. There was no theatrical mysticism, no guru on a throne. Classes cost around sixty dollars each. If you couldn’t pay, you could still participate in the free Monday night energy work sessions.