What of those well-meaning people who really believe they have a psychic gift? Certainly these people are not just frauds. They don’t learn their skills from the sort of literature quoted above. Yet consider these later thoughts from Pages from a Medium’s Notebook:
‘Success always attracts success’, and again human nature being what it is, no doubt half of the people [in the congregation at a spiritualist church] think they are psychic. They would like to learn the powers and develop the gift (since you have advised all you do) . . . also to earn the money that you represent.
So the medium (I did) starts developing classes. The dupes attend two or three nights a week, learning to develop for mediumship. This will go on as long as they can stand the strain – financial and otherwise. Of course, there is a godly fee for classes. With a class of ten or twenty at $2.00 and up per person . . . IT IS profitable. A lot of students really think (or maybe do) develop [ sic], at least, their belief – and go forth as mediums – tho I fear no [sic] very good ones until at some later time they get wise, and tackle the problem from the angle that I have been discussing all thru this book.
Some among you will remember the early Mind Control specials which aired in 2000/01. We filmed a sequence for one of those shows which never went out. The idea was this. I would go to a training college for psychics and see them at work. We would then introduce a person into the room, unknown to both the psychics and me, and I would have each of the psychics give him a reading. Afterwards, I would give my own non-psychic reading (which, unsurprisingly, the subject would find more accurate), and then I would give a reading to several of the psychics present which would hopefully impress them enormously too. End result: I look better than everyone else. Hooray, give him a Bafta.
We turned up to film at the premier psychic college. I was introduced to the Wednesday night circle, a group of ten trainee mystics who regularly met to enhance their skills. Almost all of them were women,
but their ages differed widely. Now these people were not performers. Most would never have heard of cold-reading. None seemed obviously interested in being the most impressive person in the room, and none of them, disappointingly, made any attempt to secretly find out anything about our test subject.
The first part of the proceedings consisted of the group offering up a kind of prayer and allowing the various necessary energies into the group. A few of them found that they were already sensing things they should pass on to others in the group. ‘Jean, I’m getting that you’ve been having trouble at work and it’s going to get better’, and so on. The instructor encouraged them in this for a while, and then we turned our attention to the test subject.
What followed was three hours of gradually losing the will to live. To reiterate, when you see psychics on television, you are watching edited highlights. A recent programme showed various psychics competing for the role of Britain’s best psychic, and a magical performer with whom I am friendly was asked to be an observer on the panel. Now, despite the promise of the show to put the psychic contestants through rigorous tests, its ultimate aim was in reality to entertain an audience it presumed to be profoundly thick, with all the bewildering condescension known only to TV producers. Therefore we were not granted any real ‘strict conditions’ to eliminate conscious or unconscious cheating, and the sceptics on the show (of which my friend was one) were treated as mere boring spoilsports. Watching one sequence where the psychics being tested seemed to be able to divine the contents of an envelope with reasonable accuracy, albeit openly helped along by the smiles and nods of encouragement by another judge, I was intrigued by their successes. I called my friend and asked him about it. Not surprisingly, he said that the two minutes we saw on TV was edited from about an hour of waffling and random guessing at anything from the psychics. Sadly, but unavoidably in a fast-paced show, it was the producers of the programme who decided who was to look best rather than letting us see a fair portrayal of the psychics’ dizzyingly ineffectual skills.
Our crew on our own filming day were just trying to stay awake while ten well-meaning but misguided charming psychics offered statements such as: ‘I see you on a bus going in the wrong direction. Does that mean anything to you? It might not be a bus. It might be something else, like a relationship.’ The test subjects did their best to be polite but fair, and naturally over the course of several hours a few statements unavoidably hit. The student with the long hair was indeed planning on travelling ‘to Africa, or Asia, or . . . the world’ (a favourite bit of reading). The girl had indeed bought a new bed and was amazed that one of the psychics was able to pick up on that. A few other moments provided some relief in the form of long-awaited but unimpressive agreements from the subjects. Memorably, one exchange went as follows:
PSYCHIC: I sense that you live on your own, or you share a place. SUBJECT: Erm . . .
PSYCHIC: Yes, definitely on your own, or with other people. SUBJECT: Can you be more specific?
INSTRUCTOR (angrily interjecting): Do you live alone or share a place? It must be one or the other!
SUBJECT (embarrassed): Well, I kind of live with my parents.
INSTRUCTOR (snapping): Well, then, that’s with other people, isn’t it? Don’t just sit there and not answer, it blocks the energy.
We finished the filming, along with my own (non-psychic) readings. At one point, after I had told one of the group the number of her old house, one of the psychics said to me, ‘Why won’t you admit that you’re reading auras? You clearly are, as the aura stores information like house numbers.’ Wow. You’d never need an address book. And this was a teacher at London’s primary psychic training college.
through the whole thing on television without harming himself, it would have to be edited down to its slot of five minutes or so. So should we just show the hits, which would be disproportionately favourable to the psychics, or not include them, or show just one, which would seem to be unfair? The routine was scrapped.
It was clear from watching and listening to these ‘honest’ psychics that they knew nothing of cold- reading technique. Instead, it seemed a little as if they met every week to stroke each other’s egos (they were much more eager to make each other’s statements ‘fit’ than the real-world subjects were) while learning the arts of talking vaguely, apotheosizing intuition and rationalizing failures. Again, it’s none of my business if they want to spend their time and money learning a pretend skill, but obvious self-delusion is unavoidably rather sad to witness and one wonders how aware the instructors are of the deception involved and whether they themselves are conscious frauds. Sometimes the line is blurred, but there is a distinct line between someone using linguistic tricks to score lots of ‘yes’ answers and a person who genuinely feels that they have psychic insight into a person’s situation. Of course, the cheats tend to sound better at it.
While it’s easy, and important, to hold an exploitative individual to account when he tramples all over the memory of your loved ones in pursuit of money and ego, it’s less clear whether there are important issues at stake just because a number of people mistakenly think they are developing psychic powers. Probably it doesn’t matter much at all. But there are some issues worth bearing in mind when we come across these ‘psychic schools’ or individuals who believe they are gifted in this way. Firstly, there is the association with the moral bankruptcy of the vast majority of professional psychics. The novice or believer is unwittingly buying into a world full of charlatans and showbiz skills turned nasty. While that doesn’t tar every self-styled psychic with the same brush, it might question the validity of these role models and aspirations. Secondly, there is a social issue. What level-headed person doesn’t recoil when an otherwise perfectly charming conversational partner mentions that he is psychic? As tolerant and charming as we are, do we not mentally detach ourselves as if he had said he believed in Father Christmas? I wonder if the answer to all of this is just believe what you want, of course, but best to keep quiet about it if it’s likely to make you sound stupid . Of course there will always be people interested if you tell them that you can see their aura, because plenty of people will believe anything you tell them, and most people are self-absorbed enough to be interested in what you have to say. But for every one person who is interested there’ll be six or seven who have just written you off as a lunatic. And if you think there’s a kind of eccentric dignity in that, you’re wrong. Heresy doesn’t make you right either. The fact that they ‘laughed at Galileo’ isn’t what made him a genius.
Previously I spoke about how hard it is for people to give up beliefs in which they have staked their identity. I would add to that that the believer in supernatural phenomena (psychic, religious or otherwise) also has before him a wealth of easy answers. The world becomes a place that can be explained through whatever cosmic force a believer has chosen. Amazing, tragic or magnificent events can be explained by so-and-so being psychic, the power of energy, the happiness or the vengefulness of God. I remember watching a news report shortly after the tsunami devastated chunks of Asia, and the journalist on screen spoke to a priest who had been helping with the relief effort. He asked the priest a good question, and my ears pricked up: ‘Does an event like this shake your faith?’ The priest’s reply, which I give here as well as I can remember it, was, ‘Quite the opposite. Only yesterday I was speaking to a man who had sustained terrible injuries from the tsunami and was dying in hospital. Wonderfully, he came to accept Jesus as his Saviour before he died. So in fact God is working some real miracles here and it’s amazing to see.’ What?! I am sure that the twisted intellectual cowardice shown in that answer was more than compensated for by the priest’s efforts in caring for the sick and injured. But how much more impressive would have been a reply that admitted difficulty in understanding it and a lack of easy answers.
tastes, we can generally appreciate such things as music, art or wine better when we understand a bit about them. We read up on our favourite singers or artists because we feel we can appreciate their work better when we know how they think and what they bring to their work. The giddy delight and curiosity that comes from marvelling at the beauty of this universe is deepened, not cheapened, by the laws and facts science gives us to aid our understanding. In a similar way, the psychological tricks at work behind many seemingly paranormal events are truly more fascinating than the explanation of other-worldliness precisely because they are of this world, and say something about how rich and complex and mysterious we are as human beings to be convinced by such trickery, indeed to want to perpetrate it in the first place. If you are reading this book you will have an interest in the capabilities of the human mind. Nothing cheapens or insults those capabilities more than the insistence that we are psychic. Cheap answers are for cheap thinkers.
I personally don’t understand why anyone should need a paranormal realm, or for that matter God, to make this world or this life richer or more mysterious. But I see that there is an ease with which such belief systems provide simple answers and immediate meaning that appeals to the sentiment, and I understand that for many people, particularly those indoctrinated at a young age, such simple answers and easy meaning might be irresistible. Again, though, that irresistibility itself, and the question of why it exists is surely far more fascinating than the make-believe concepts it might lead to in a believer’s mind.
I still love the idea of ghosts or angels and am drawn to great stories of the paranormal. I love them because, like anyone, I relish the thrill to the imagination they provoke. The ‘unknown’ makes us tingle. But these are just stories, and the fact that there is much we do not understand yet does not mean that such things will not be understood at some point. We need first to understand and define the outer limits of what is ‘normal’ or ‘sensory’ before we refer to something as ‘paranormal’ or ‘extrasensory’. Until then, to treat something as self-evidently paranormal is to curtail curiosity and the willingness to learn. And by applying easy labels and simple meanings that are satisfying to those who don’t like thinking, and patronizing to those who do, such treatment strips us, our minds, our world and our universe of their staggering complexity and richness.
In the words of Douglas Adams (quoted by Richard Dawkins at the start of his wonderful book The God Delusion), ‘Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe there are fairies at the bottom of it too?’