How to search a CLOB for the '*' character ?

 I have built a context index on a CLOB field and the CONTAINS function/phrase works great, until I realized that I sometimes want to search for a string of characters made up of 3 asterisks, like this '***', or 'RANDY***'. I see that the asterisk is the wildcard for Context Indexes, but does anyone know of a way to search for any string with embedded asterisks ?

Thanks,

--Randy