As a lot of people take down the road of afterlife knowledge, often they visit people who 'claim' to be gifted. Now from personal experience, i think 99% of these people are complete frauds.

Rarely do they provide information which gives you faith, that there is more then the physical. Often claiming a multitude of reasons why they screw up so frequently. I don't find comfort in guess work, as i am sure most people don't.

My question is, has anyone visited a 'gifted' person and received accurate information, such as names/places and dates, which makes them believe 100% in there abilities. Who did you visit, and what information did they give to you, which you found impressive?

Hi Spitfire,  I would have to say that I received excellent information from Linn at Linn's forum. I did not understand all of it, initially, but it proved itself to me over time.  She provided accurate names and information pertinent to my life experiences over the last year.

I consulted one medium over the internet a few years ago.  She accurately described a physical problem I was having with my leg at the time, a serious one which I required physical therapy to overcome, but she had the opposite leg.  She also described blockages within my throat chakra area, which I look back and see was absolutely true. Self-expression was an area I seriously needed to develop, and it was being completely blocked because of my life situation.  She also described love coming in which she saw as pink light through one side of my head from a helper. I have always known that I have such a helper, which I interpreted as my grandmother. Now I am not so sure who the helper is but I absolutely know that there is someone guiding me.

I am not in the habit of regularly consulting mediums, but I would allow that many of them are sincere and developing their talents. Also, it is not always easy to understand their references to certain things, but they can become crystal clear later.

I say, be cautious. But give it a chance.

Ultimately, I think we are our own mediums. When we are in full awareness of our own alignment with Spirit we find that all things are put in their proper place for us and we are given signs regularly that we are positioned exactly on the path where we are supposed to be.  I absolutely believe this to be true.

love, blink

I have yet to visit a medium myself, though I personally find Gordon Smith to appear and seem quite  accurate and reputable, he also isn't on tv every week and apart from some books and cd's etc he doesnt stick his name on anything like dodgy phonelines.I doubt you will find any medium who has 100% accuracy purely because of the way they work but sometimes its not the details of the message but how it is relayed.

I liken many types of mediums to remote viewers.  Some of them seem to access an area of general information in terms of images, numbers, etc.  This is often not very accurate.  I am not fond of hearing these readings, because they sound a lot like "cold readings" or guesses (AKA John Edwards).  There are "hits" and "misses."

I have mentioned here that one of the most impressive televised medium performences I have seen was that of George Anderson on an ABC television special.  In that special they picked three celebrities at random, making certain he could not possibly have known who they would be beforehand.

Anderson sat and sketched with a pencil while giving the reading to "distract himself."  His readings were truly amazing.  The deceased loved one came through, and gave specific verifiable information like names, dates, places, and apparently certain nicknames and other items that the person getting the reading swore no one could have known of.  The conversations were not limited to letters, numbers or the color pink.  They were true two way conversations.  Most of the deceased had the same message for their loved ones; that they were fine, happy, not to grieve for them, and they loved the living.  Ok, that sounded a bit campy, but perhaps is true anyway.

Anderson was by far one of the greatest living mediums I've witnessed or one of the most fantastic shams.  Either way, he appeared to be the real deal.  Don's dream man - full of "chatty ease," with the deceased and verifications that would make Swedenborg green with envy. 

Matthew

HI Spit-
First, I totally agree, most "psychics": are a total waste of their own time. Second, there are enough people on the planet that it seems that there are also a lot of them who are pretty darn good.  That's why these few names stand out, out of a global population of  4 billion.

The TV reader John Edwards is a good example of communication - once in a while something about the future, else a lot of this is how it was stuff. I get a daily horoscope from a friend Linda Black who has totally amazed me by being accurate. But she is not predictive - she simply seems to be able to sense the flow of ongoing events, and more or less describes background conditions.  Its accurate, but not in the "look under the bed to find the lst diamnd ring" kind of thng.

I've ound that when people go into a past life regression they are able to contat their relatives and such in the spirit space (whatever that means) and seem happy to communicate. But thus far, no revelations.  Because PLR makes use of imagination as a "tuning mechanism", and then uses regenerative feedback to focus on and develop recall, it always contains about 3 db of noise - translating to 50% garbage and 50% valid data. (Which is why Juditha's teachers keep telling her to simply say what she gets without adding or deleting - minimizes added errors.)

For some reason John Dunne's "Experiment With Time comes to mind frequently this week - He was an engineer who documented much of the reception process about disasters and other things - Some was very acurate, but not predictive. (Also I disagree with his "time" ideas.) There are a few others for whom data exisrs - Manly Hall comes to mind as well - also a fair recollection of his psychic experiments.

Many of us reach for the phone only to find that the person we're calling (typically my wife) is already on the line calling us.  That's as close as most of us experience. How to rate that - a frequent coincidence by chance alone with odds against of the order of millions to one - hardly.

I've been watching Juditha's posts over the last many months as she has been developing her sklls, and I think her remarks about localization of whatever it is that she is getting are to the point.

Maybe the question should be, "What do we want to get from a psychic?" so that we feel satisfied and validated.

dave

Craig,

When I was 20, I had the chance to spend a lot of time with a unique Christian minister whose faith produced all kinds of spectacular miracles.  I was in awe of him, and so, I asked him about the unique key to his success.  His unexpected answer stunned me and, even today, it puzzles me.   He replied, "I discovered that God could only use me powerfully when I was truly willing to become an atheist."  What he meant was this: he had to resist the pressure to choose comfort as the booby prize in his quest for hard-won spiritual truth.  He had to resist the temptation to reduce God and Jesus to a working mental construct to give his life meaning.  No, he was going to be either totally committed with every fibre of his being or an indifferent skeptic, no matter how depressed that made him feel.   That's exactly the brutal honesty that God prefers.   Jesus said He'd rather people be spiritually "cold" than "lukewarm" (Revelation 3:15-16). 

I hope you never lower your standards and embrace a second-hand spirituality that doesn't really ring true for you.  You and I have debated many spiritual issues and I think it was important that we did so.  But you are also right in your insistence that you need a direct and compelling experience of God's loving presence that is absulutely convincing to you.  I pray that you'll eventually achieve this goal. 

As for mediums and psychics, you have good reason to be skeptical.  I will now repost some of the reasons why from my other thread in case you haven't read it. 

Mediums routinely put their eager sitters in touch with deceased loved ones, who seem alarmingly available.   If these contacts were geniune, one would expect these loved ones to be unavailable because of present commitments and activities much of the time.  True, some mediums will protest that they sometimes fail to contact the spirit desired by the sitter.   But generally these spirits seem far too available to be credible.  The spirits seem incapable of answering a simple question like, “So what have you been doing since I last talked to you through this medium?”  To explain away this problem some resort to the desperate expedient of claiming that our deceased loved ones now live in a timeless realm.  This solution is refuted by the astral explorations of Emanuel Swedenborg and Robert Bruce who discover that most heavenly planes are stll subject to a sense of time, though time may seem more compressed in certain realms.  Consider my answers to these 4 questions:   

(1) What if sitters request contact with fake deceased relatives and the mediums still oblige with a very impressive channeling?               

(2) What if the spirit control of mediums with impressive verifications can be proven to be a fraud?   What conclusion would that warrant about other spirit controls whose self-professed identity cannot be verified?                                                 

(3) What if a drop-in communicator could provide amazing verifications even involving precognition of the future, and yet, be later proven a fraud?            

(4) What if it can be shown that the attribution of channeled materials to discarnate friends and relatives reflects a culturally conditioned bias?   

(1) As already mentioned, Leonore Piper is one of the most impressive mediums ever.   She had the uncanny ability to channel two entities at the same time, one through automatic writing and the other through entranced speech.   Psychologist G. Stanley Hall had a trick up his sleeve when he went for a sitting with her. She was currently using the spirit of Richard Hodgson as her control.   Hodgson had formerly investigated her, but had recently died of a massive heart attack.  Hall asked Hodgson's spirit to contact Hall’s niece, “Bessie Beals,” so that he might speak with her.  Miss Beals was duly introduced and proceeded to communicate with Hall through Mrs. Piper.  Actually Bessie Beals did not exist.  She was a figment of Hall’s mind.  "Hodgson" in embarrassment tried to wriggle out of the situation, saying that he had been mistaken about the name.  He said that the person brought was a Jessie Beals, related to another sitter.  Dr. Samuel Soal...visualized incidents with an imaginary friend, John Ferguson.  He then went for a sitting with the medium, Blanche Cooper.  The incidents he visualized came forth as though communicated from beyond death!  These cases demonstrate that mediums can unwittingy gain information about the ceased by reading the sitter's mind.  They then routinely dramatize this ESP by inventing a phony personal contact.  One might expect the telephatic abilities of their spirit controls to detect this sort of ruse.   Clearly, the spirit controls were also a fake.

(2) Some spirit controls seem clearly fraudulent.  While Richard Hodgson was still alive, he thoroughly investigated one of Leonore Piper's spirit controls named Phinuit in 1892.  The Phinuit persona claimed to be the spirit of a French doctor whose full name was Jean Phinuit Scliville and who had lived in the early 1800s and had practiced medicine in London, France, and Belgium.  But he was unable to speak more than a few French phrases, displayed no more knowledge of medicine than the average layman, and had never (according to medical records) attended the medical schools at which he claimed to have studied and practiced.  Hodgson initially concluded that Phinuit was just a secondary personality of Mrs. Piper which either erroneously believed itself to be or falsely pretended to be the spirit of a deceased French doctor.   But Hodgson later changed his mind and now concluded that some of the material produced in a trance by Mrs. Piper seemed to go beyond what might be obtained by thought transference from the sitters and thus seemed to suggest real contact with the dead. In his words, “Among these (comunicators) are more than half-a-dozen intimate friends of my own, who have produced upon me the impression...that they are the personalities I knew, with characteristic intelligence and emotion, questioning me and conversing with me under difficulties.”  It seems doubtful that Hodgson would have changed his mind if he had lived to discover the Gordon Davis case, which I shall now describe.

(3) At a sitting with medium Blanche Cooper on Jan. 4 ,1922 , Dr. Samuel Soal’s deceased brother unexpectedly said, “Sam, I’ve brought someone who knows you.”  Then in a very clear, strong, and familiar voice, Gordon Davis began to speak through Cooper.  Davis was an old school acquaintance whom Soal believed to have been killed during World War I.  Davis seemed to verify this when he said, “My poor wife is my only concern now--and my kiddie.”  Soal thought he recognized Davis' tone of voice with its fastidious accent.  The communicator used forms of expression that typified the real Gordon Davis' speech  (e.g. “old chap”; “confab” instead of “meeting”).  Davis spoke of the school they had attended, Rochford, and provided details of their last conversation.  He proceeded to refer correctly to persons, places, and events from their school days.  At two ensuing sittings on Jan. 9 and 30, 1922, Davis gave a detailed description of his house, its contents, and the arrangement of its contents.   

To his great surprise, Soal learned in 1925 that Davis was still alive after all and went to visit him.  A great deal of the channeled material about the house proved to be correct.  But Davis and his "wife and kiddie” had not moved into the house until over a year after the relevant sitting!  Davis' diary showed that during Soal’s sittings he had been seeing real estate clients.  Only around the time of the sittings did Davis even inspect this house for the first time.   But Davis did not move into the house until a year later.  More importantly, the furnishings of the house had not been planned in advance!  Yet the details channeled earlier turned out to be correct: a large mirror, lots of paintings, glorious mountain and sea scenes, very big vases with funny saucers, two brass candlesticks, and a black dickie bird.  Two of the paintings were only done after the sittings!  So much of the material channeled in the later sittings about the house must be ascribed to precognitive telepathy (John Heaney, 176-177).  And this precognition surely casts doubt on the authenticity Gladys Leonard's repeated channeling of many details posted in specific columns of
tomorrow's newspaper.

Why is channeling not discredited in this way more often?  Well, ask yourself how often you are mistakenly informed that your friend has died.   Was the medium able to exploit Soal’s mistaken faith in Davis’ death as an aid in the process of reconstructing Davis’ personality and future by precognitive telepathy?  Or were the medium (Blanche Cooper) and sitter (Sam Soal) duped by an impersonating spirit?

(4) Shamans understand their mediumship to put them in contact with spirits and demons as well as with deceased people.  In earlier centuries Neoplatonists also practiced trance mediumship, but attributed it to the agency of gods or demons rather than to discarnate humans.   Likewise, witches from the 17th and 18th centuries ascribed their channeled material to demons.  Perhaps
the modern attempt to identify spirit controls with deceased personalities reflects the wishful thinking of modern cultural prejudice.  Why is Leonora Piper’s spirit control (Phinuit) lying about his true identity?  Why did Sam Soal’s alleged brother lie about bringing Gordon Davis’ spirit through?   Or were these people simply deceived?

Don

I thought I would add the thought that there truly do seem to have been many
verifiable and extensive channelings; albeit many of them come from areas
seemingly distant from afterdeath communication.

Examples would be great composers such as Mozart, Brahms, or Copeland.
They seemed to receive their compositions in a complete form.  They were, in
my opinion, direct transmissions of a sort we do not yet understand. Many painters
see the work complete before they even pick up the brush.  I believe that O'keeffe
had that experience.

Another example would be the great, yet tragic, Indian mathematician, Ramunajan.
Even as he lay dying, he continued to transcribe the whisperings he heard.  He at-
tributed the whispers to a goddess of his faith, Hinduism.  His insights are vital to
understanding string theory.  Einstein was floating in a canoe when he saw a hand.
The hand wrote the formula for the theory of relativity.  Was his almost somnolent
state essential to the event?

It makes me wonder about the idiot savants.  Are they, because almost egoless,
able to transmit what they do without the hindrance of personal overlays?  We
do not often value their contributions because we don't see the value other than
as mental novelties.  However, because of the way i. savants are capable of relating to
reality, they simply do not understand the world's values.  I have seen a clay sculpture
by one such person that any museum would value as priceless if it had been made
in ancient Greece.

Hi Vikingsgal,

The talents that you describe, the ability to "sleep on it," and come out the next day with an idea/composition/work of art, is, I believe most akin to remote viewing.  Many famous inventors are not sure what the divine inspiration was that or how they stumbled upon it.  Remote viewers learn to observe images from their subconscious when they concentrate on specific geopgraphic coordinates.  The US military made use out of the talents found in remote viewing. 

Many have postulated a "universal field," of accesible information, and some believe that divine inspiration or genius comes from tapping into this universal field.  I believe, as Carl Jung did that we all have a subconscious connection to this field or a part of the divine, and that through our conscious intent, we may access this information, or manipulate physical reality. 

Those who come up with impressive compositions, art, inventions are different than mediums.  One would hope that mediums are those who make a direct connection with the spirit of a deceased person.

Best to you,

Matthew