Different mediums connect with spirits in different ways. When I was taking classes in mediumship at a Spiritualist church,
the first thing I would perceive about a spirit
was a picture of them in my mind's eye. We used the term
clairvoyance to refer to visual psychic perceptions. A lot
of mediums are primarily clairvoyant but also get other types of
impressions. Some mediums primarily get feelings or hear words, but that
is less common. Hearing spirits is called clairaudience.
With the visual images that I perceived,
sometimes there would be other
information attached. I would know what I was seeing, and I
would know things about it. It was like an email with attachments. It
seemed to me that the easiest way for spirits to get through to me was
visually, but once I had the "packet" and knew it was psychic, they knew
I'd notice the other information.
When I was in class, one of the hardest thing for the spirits was, I
think, to convince me that the mental impressions I received were
psychic and not my imagination. The way they would help me realize this
was by showing me things from weird angles or placing them off center.
If you imagine a house you imagine looking at it from the street in the
center of your visual field. Once in class, I saw a house from two feet away and
looking along the side of the outside wall. It seemed pretty obvious to
me that I wasn't imagining that.
Being clairvoyant has the advantage that you can describe the spirit and
the sitter will generally be able to recognize who it is. The spirit
can also show you what they did in life. Clairvoyance is great for
identifying the spirit. The disadvantage of clairvoyance is that the
spirits have to use symbols to give a message. I would occasionally get
feelings, and less often smells, and words. When I got words, even though
I use the term clairaudient, I felt the words in my mouth
as if I was saying them rather than hearing them.
One of the hardest things about mediumship was putting psychic
perceptions into words. You have to develop an appropriate vocabulary
to say things without offending people and to describe what
you see. It was a skill I didn't have much practice at. I had
plenty of experience putting things into words from writing corporate
e-mails and writing on technical subjects from work life and graduate
school, but that was not the same as what I had to do in mediumship.
Having to put things into words also gives your analytical brain a
chance to color the information with inferences, deductions, and
associations which leads to errors in the reading.
I think being clairaudient must be
easiest for the medium. They just repeat what they hear.
By the end of a reading I would often get a feeling of the personality
of the spirit like the way you have a mental idea of the personality of
someone you know. One spirit in particular had a really cheerful
attitude. Attitudes are contagious when you are perceiving them
psychically. Just communicating with him make me feel cheerful. I
didn't want the reading to end.
A close emotional bond between the sitter and the spirit or the spirit
and the medium usually results in better communication between the
spirit and the medium. This is consistent with the findings of
parapsychology which have shown that emotional involvement
correlates with better psychic functioning.
The problem of coloring psychic information with inferences, deductions
and associations is a problem that also came up in remote viewing
research. Remote viewers call it "analytic overlay". This is described
some of the popular books on the
remote viewing research
and in the
military remote viewing manual available on the internet. The methods
the remote viewers have for detecting and dealing with analytic overlay
are very good. I think mediums could learn something by studying the
systematic and scientific approach that was taken when remote viewing
methodology was developed.
It would be interesting to have mediums go through a remote viewing
course and remote viewers go to a mediumship class.
I suspect a lot would be learned by both groups of psychics and by
researchers from cross training.
With mediumship, there are spirits working to help the
psychic, so it would also be interesting to see if there was some way to
measure or identify that there is something different occurring with
mediumship than with remote viewing.
It is unfortunate that mediumship has not been studied with the
same systematic
scientific approach that remote viewing has been and also that
systematic and scientific training methods for mediumship have not been
developed. There has been a lot of research into mediumship but none
that I am aware of into training methods.
It is very valuable that the method of training for remote
viewing was developed at the same time a systematic methodology was
developed for doing it. That makes a big difference in studying remote
viewing scientifically. It would be nice if an analogous system existed
for mediumship. When the researchers are thoroughly familiar with
the teaching
methods and the methods for doing the task, they are better able to
design experiments to study the process, find better ways of doing
it, and discovering the natural laws that determine how it works.
Spirits get better at communicating the
more they do it.
In my opinion, this is one of the strongest arguments against
super-psi
as an explanation for mediumship.
This is also why I think scientists who study mediumship should work
with a development circle of advanced students. The deceased relatives
of these students have a lot of practice communicating through the other
class members and are very good at it. A blind study where the medium
doesn't know who the sitter is should give very good results. The
results could be judged by having a sitter try to distinguish a reading
that was for him from a reading that was for someone else. In this
situation, it doesn't matter that the students know all about each
other's deceased relatives because the reading and judging are done
blind.
Copyright © 2009 by ncu9nc All rights reserved. Texts quoted from other sources are Copyright © by their owners.
Posts
