<p>Because they prey on the naïveté and pocketbook of others.</p>
<p>I was unusually intuitive in my late teens and 20’s. I would say things to people that I did not even know I knew but would simply be stated and the event would unfold as I had told it would. I came to the conclusion that the things that I thought or felt that had no emotion was my psychic knowledge and those that had emotion and feeling were just me. I could give you countless events that were my psychic self but in the end I shut it off. Others thought I needed to be responsible if I “knew” things and that is actually not true. It is just information and it is not meant to be a responsibility.
Otherwise, I have been to a few amazing psychics and others not so much so. I do think it is great fun if you have the money and if you take it all with an open “this is fun” attitude.
The most amazing experience I have had (and have on tape) was when I was in my late 20’s and the college I was working at had a psychic convention. A very young man did my reading and told me that while he saw me with 2 children he only saw me pregnant once. He became very confuse and “cleared” to start again. That is what he saw and did not know why, nor did I. I did have birth child and then adopted a child. I had forgotten about this reading until my adopted child was 6 months old. Adopting by choice was simply not a thing anyone would have thought about at that time and place. He has since died because he did not see his murderer coming. But, you see, that is just not what psychic abilities are about. They arrive when they want and are not meant to play the stock market or predict the next earthquake UNLESS! that information comes to you. It is a gift and I will totally agree most on the market are not real
I have a few more things but this post is long enough for now.</p>
<p>This thread reminds me of an amusing newspaper announcement I saw a couple decades back: “The psychic fair had been cancelled due to unforeseen circumstances.”</p>
<p>
Well at least you’re intellectually consistent, MommaJ. I’m agnostic about both matters myself. In regard to psychic abilities, I have read credible reports from many clear-headed rational people and have trouble believing that every last one of them was either lying or deluded. How statistically unlikely is that?</p>
<p>There’s a town in Florida, Cassadaga, where most of the residents are mediums…Cassada is located between Orlando and Daytona. Mediums are about as real as professional wrestlers…maybe good for entertainment at best…</p>
<p><a href=“http://cassadaga.org/”>http://cassadaga.org/</a></p>
<p>How many of you who are wholly skeptical about the entire spectrum of “psychics/fortune teller or clairvoyant/medium” are followers of any of the major organized religions?</p>
<p>Not me.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Looking forward to hearing more from you on this topic. </p>
<p>I think the effectiveness has as much to do with the subject wanting to believe the experience as anything the psychic/fortune teller does. </p>
<p>When I came to the US in the mid-70s as a grad student, I was advised to do palm-reading as a way of connecting with young ladies. I knew some basic stuff about it because it was quite popular at home and while I had no belief in it, I proceeded in putting powder/cornstarch paste on peoples’ hands that highlighted the lines and started making general statements and went along if I received a positive feedback. </p>
<p>My close US friend who suggested this whole game to begin with wanted me to do an experiment - make exactly the opposite observation of what Palmistry said the lines were indicating, but keep it positive - ie., rather than saying someone is not analytical, say she is artistic, etc. Guess what - my success rate was exactly the same as before. </p>
<p>While this isn’t supported by formal numbers, by take on it was this - if you say a couple of dozen things about someone, you’re likely to get some right, some off, some really close and others way off. A person who wants to believe will focus on the hits while disregarding or minimizing the misses, and this was as good an explanation as any for some of the positive responses I received. </p>
<p>I saw the L.I. medium on tv, she asked an audience of 100 or so if anyone had lost someone. (Gee, do you think?)
After quite a few raised their hands, she asked- anyone lose a spouse? (How psychic!)
One old man, near the front in late 80’s or maybe 90, said yes to having lost a spouse. “Was it your wife?” She asked. Really? It doesn’t take a psychic to know if an 80+ yr old man loses a spouse it is an overwhelming probability of having been his wife.
“Were you married a long time?’” she asked. He said yes, so she responded “I thought so.” But I realized, had he said No, she would have just answered “I didn’t think so” and she would have appeared to have been correct.</p>
<p>I sometimes find spookhunter shows entertaining. Someone “sensitive” to spirits is walked through a house purported to have spooks. I would love to see a show where nothing unusual has ever happened, but they tell the “sensitive” it seemed haunted. They could even be more specific about occurrences or specific rooms. Would love to see if the person senses the supernatural or finds no evidence.</p>
<p>A lot of it is outright fraud, a lot of people telling people what they want to hear and so forth. I don’t totally discount it, simply because science has yet to be able to quantify it doesn’t mean there may not be some truth to it. If you talked about entanglement, a force in the universe where two particles can shift quantum state simultaneously when one is forced to change, and the two particles were once together, and this happens no matter how far they are apart, a lot of people would say “BS”, but it is quite real, though science doesn’t know why. Jung studied tarot cards, that I have some experience with, and he felt the power of them was tapping into archtypes humans carry with them, and perhaps not predicting the future, but rather telling the person what they feel reading them. I have used the cards, not as a decision making thing, but rather as a means to see if the images there triggered something in myself, and I have found them valuable. </p>
<p>There was at least one case where I experienced something that I cannot explain, would never claim it proves anything, where a young guy did a reading on my wife at a place in NYC (the store specialized in stuff for practitioners of wicca and such), and I was right there, and I am pretty good at reading people, the guy did a reading on her, he didn’t ask questions, he didn’t prompt her for anything, he simply did a reading, and he came out with things that weren’t generic. Could he have read my wife’s body language and such? I would say so, but the guy did it without looking at her, and he came up with things that we had only discovered recently ourselves, and what he said about the future for her was pretty accurate, it was close enough to make me think the guy was genuine. He didn’t make a living doing this, and he refused a tip, simply took the fee the store charged, he also did something with me when I was in the middle of something at a prior job that later on I found out he was almost dead spot on. I didn’t tell him anything about the situation background at all, he didn’t ask questions, I simply said a scenario was playing out at work, gave some brief details, and he told me what he saw going on…and like I said when the situation was resolved, several years later I heard what happened, what was going on, and it was almost dead spot on…could it have been luck? Could he have thrown out a generic that matched? Maybe, but the devil was in the details, and for so much to be right? You won’t convince me that something wasn’t going on with him, what it was, I don’t know…can people sense the timeline? Can see see glimpses of the future? Dont know, and I won’t claim it is science. You would have had to have met this kid, I am good at reading people, and he was too humble, too serious , to make me think he was a fraud, on top of everything else, I never saw him try to gouge anyone, and he didn’t make a living at this, either.</p>
<p>But then again, we all have beliefs like that. The adherents of a major faith, with over 1 billion members, believe that a priest doing an invocation turns wine into blood and bread into flesh, a lot of people believe that after we die, we go to another place, yet that cannot be proven by science. In a sense, we belong to churches and such in the hope that is real, and hope that what they teach us about how we are supposed to live will lead us there…it isn’t science, and I could blow transubstantiation out of the water , all I would have to do is take the communion wafer and the wine and run an analysis on it…</p>
<p>One comment, the reason that even legitimate psychics don’t get rich may be because the predictions of things like Tarot cards are not that exactly, they work in broad strokes, not in detailed information of which stock to buy and so forth, a lot of the experience is in trying to understand what is being shown to you, it is not shown in print details, but in impressions.</p>
<p>Would I ever claim that predictions, divination and such is ‘real’ as in able to be proven scientifically? No, any more than I can prove that believing in Jesus allows one to go to heaven, or that God answers prayers, or any other items of belief. To claim it is ‘real’ as in proven science fact is as off as someone of faith claiming what they believe is ‘the truth’, since both are based on belief, not science. As far as frauds go, same thing, how many religious leaders proclaiming all kinds of things ended up being frauds? How many televangelists were basically high powered scams, to suck in the gullible? To claim that all such people are frauds would be like claiming all religion is about money and taking in suckers because some are frauds:).</p>
<p>Why do I leave an open mind? Because while science has not been able to prove that psychics and such are real, that some in fact are doing something, it also cannot prove that all of them are fraudulent. James Randi’s challenge is valid, but it doesn’t prove that all psychics and such are frauds, since his test is not be applied to every psychic in every situation. I think people who desperately go to psychics and mediums and expect it to be all true and base their lives on what they are told are doing themselves a disservice, but I also have seen enough to make me think there very well could be something out there, the way that believers in religious faith believe in prayer and so forth.</p>
<p>I gotta ask–any haunted houses out there? And they unfortunately don’t need to be old houses to be haunted… Not mine (before anyone asks)!!</p>
<p>We live in a 100 year old house. When one of my sons was about 5 or 6 years old, he saw ghosts on a few occasions. Not scary ghosts, just quick glimpses of people who weren’t really there. </p>
<p>One of the “ghosts” my son saw was a child in old-fashioned clothes sitting on the edge of the front porch. Another one was an adult carrying a small child on his shoulders, going down a flight of stairs.</p>
<p>I have no reason to think my son was making this up.</p>
<p>He has not seen anything like that since then, and nobody else in the family ever did see the “ghosts.”</p>
<p>I heard on the radio yesterday that one in eight people claims to have seen visions (had hallucinations). I guess I would be one of those people, since I saw (or dreamt, or hallucinated) my (dead) father after my daughter’s birth. Still, I would not have thought the number was so high. </p>
<p>This thread reminded me of the “magic shop” I went to when I was 16 or so. The proprietor claimed to be psychic and did a reading on me, talking about how I was angry, my parents didn’t understand me, etc. I remember talking to him for a long time; of course, it’s obvious to me now that all that would be obvious to any adult with a modicum of knowledge of teenagers. His knowledge must have been quite high; he ended his long and intimate chat with me by propositioning me–and I never went back. </p>
<p>I don’t find it impossible that some people might have esoteric powers. But I think the chances are overwhelming that anybody who is taking your money to tell your fortune isn’t one of them. If they were for real, they could tell you to only pay them if their predictions came true.</p>
<p>I used to date a card-carrying psychic. He belonged to a chapter that put on quarterly psychic fairs. I am a skeptic by nature, but out of curiosity my cousin and I went to one of the fairs. The guy I was dating had given me a list of people he recommended at various price ranges (the more-experienced psychics cost more). I went to a $10 psychic – not the most expensive, not the least. </p>
<p>One thing she said stood out to me. She kept insisting I had recently crossed state lines. I kept telling her no, I hadn’t. Eventually, I met back up with my cousin, and we compared readings. When I told her about the insistence of the psychic that I had recently crossed state lines, my cousin reminded me that the previous weekend I HAD gone to a big party weekend on Lake Texoma and we boated to a friend’s cabin on the Oklahoma side of the lake. Doh! That stuck with me more than anything else because there was nothing about what I said that told her in any way that she was correct, but she was. I’d never go see another psychic again. Just seems kind of silly though I do think some people are probably more “in tune” to the spiritual world.</p>
<p>My sister went to a medium with friends. They were all asking about folks on the “other side” She asked about our dad. The medium stated that he refused to participate, as he thought it was all nonsense. Which is just what he’d say when he was alive as well. </p>
<p>When I was 15, I went to Madame Marie(yes, Bruce Springsteen’s Madame Marie) on the Asbury Park boardwalk. She said to me, “You had an argument this morning.” I was a 15 year old girl. I had arguments of some sort just about every day. As young as I was, I didn’t fall for it.</p>