‘The universe is very slightly biased toward the positive.’

Although it hasn’t been widely advertised, every Wednesday evening an extraterrestrial from the planet Essassani, which is said to lie somewhere in the direction of the Orion constellation, pays a visit to Earth to edify and astonish his followers.

This happens in a house on Gaviota Avenue in Encino. The house is at the end of a long driveway, behind another house, but the people in front don’t seem to mind as long as nobody parks in their driveway.

When I dropped by last Wednesday to find out what I had been missing in New Age awareness, a line had already formed an hour before the show.

I paid $10 to get in and picked up a piece of literature. It said that the extraterrestrial, Bashar, can travel almost instantaneously anywhere in space and time but has never actually set foot on Earth, although he may in seven or eight years.

For now, Bashar appears in voice only, speaking through the person of a young man named Darryl Anka.

Anka is what is known in the New Age lexicon as a channel, someone whose body serves as the physical medium for someone else’s spirit.

Anka has been channeling Bashar for three years. Besides the Wednesday night group, he does private sessions and sells cassettes and videotapes of Bashar.

Shortly before 8 p.m., Anka, an unimposing figure except for a serious face accentuated by a dark goatee, walked to a high-backed chair in the living room.

Facing about 30 devotees on a mismatched collection of folding metal chairs, dinette chairs, deck chairs and couches, Anka relaxed into a pose of Buddha-like tranquillity, face thrust forward, eyes closed. His head snapped violently sideways several times. His breathing roared richly like a tiger’s growl. His face vibrated.

Suddenly, a funny Shakespearean actor’s voice came forth, like a leprechaun doing Hamlet.

“How ARE you all?” Bashar asked.

For the next three hours the voice dominated the room, projecting magnificently in an intoxicating blend of chattiness and ritual authority.

Bashar opened with a mini sermon. He used the analogy of the two sides of the coin to explain how the forces of the universe, both positive and negative, are balanced.

“Now let us add one more dimension, the edge of the coin,” he went on. “The universe is very slightly biased toward the positive. That is because the edge of the coin has a slight tilt in the positive direction. The negative is, in a sense, 49%, the positive 51.”

The significance of that, Bashar said, is that those seeking positive direction need not struggle constantly to stay on the good side of the coin but can merely find their way to the edge and everything will be OK.

“The edge of the coin gives you an edge,” he said with a smile of self-satisfaction. Bashar then asked for questions and, soon enough, stumbled upon an example for the evening’s lesson.

It came from a blonde woman in front who told a long narrative about a recent event in her life, touched off by an auto accident that was another woman’s fault.

The woman said she resisted the impulse to get angry, thinking, as Bashar might have taught, that life is an adventure and she must follow it.

So, naturally, a charming man soon walked up and told her he had friends who would fix her car for only $220.

She got the $220 from the other driver and gave it to the man. Only later did she awake in the middle of the night with the realization that he wasn’t coming back.

Having listened patiently, Bashar instantly saw the meaning. The other driver was her in a past life, he told the woman.

“This is the completion of a cycle,” he said. “The old self meeting the new self. You will now be able to meet the new self you are to become and you have done this in a very exciting way.”

The audience cooed with admiration. Bashar continued, explaining that the con man came to her because she was on the edge of the coin, waiting for the positive flow.

In that state, he said, people “will attract an individual to take something from them to get the flow going.”

The woman said she was grateful.

Bashar answered dozens of questions.

He told a woman who was having three menstruations every month that they were fragments of herself being born and that they would go away.

Others sought to engage Bashar in interplanetary repartee, a game at which he excelled, issuing long monologues of convoluted New Age dialectics.

A man in a lumberjack shirt, for example, chided Bashar with the news that he had fallen into a “viscous sea of negativity” after his last personal channeling session.

Bashar told him not to worry and speculated later that it could be “post-transformational depression” following a move from a lower to a higher energy state.

“As soon as you run into that much energy, it feels heavy,” he said. “When you begin to connect into the understanding that all that energy is what will uplift you, will support you, will accelerate you . . . “

At that point, my notes fail, paralyzed by Bashar’s onrush of words. You probably get the point. If you need to know more, it’s all on video for $20.