Post by Mr. Jon Donnis on Feb 29, 2012 13:19:36 GMT
Why Ross Bartlett Got So Caught Up In The Mediumship Game In The First Place
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You know when you think on what most 17 year olds get up to and spend their time on, traipsing around spiritualist churches performing to an audience of people by and large three times their age isn’t the first thing you think about.
It’s not even the tenth to be honest.
Which got me interested in why a 17 year old boy got so caught up in the medium game in the first place. Lets face it, it’s not exactly a clincher pastime in the dating stakes, nor is it likely to provide much in the way of street cred with the lads. Then there’s having to spend most of your time with people at least old enough to be your mother, granny, great granny …you get the picture. For one so young its hard to understand why they would want to spend their free time far less embark on a career that involves talking about and immersing yourself in everything that is well….dead.
There’s always the possibility of the answer being “because I want to help” and that may be a genuine belief in some who get into the world of woo but just as possible are the many less fluffy reasons that hold some significance in swapping the playstation for the planchette.
In many cases it takes a good few years of 30 something directionless pondering, a couple of major life crisis, or at least some sudden (coincidental of course) change in circumstance that leads the ex business person, chef, publican, plumber whatever to take to the small halls and back rooms of local Spiritualist churches or public houses in a bid to become the latest medium on the circuit. But there’s something unnerving about a kid fresh out of school yet to succumb to all that launching themselves out there as the next Colin Fry alike or Derek Acorah clone.
As I pondered this I found this article on Ross Bartlett Teen Psychic written by none other than his manager Norie Miles for Ghost Voices magazine and already that begins to hint at why this kid isn’t spending his time down the local in hangout and instead is in a ill fitting suit rolling his eyes and spinning out clichés that would make even Degsey cringe. 17 year old kids don’t have managers they have careers teachers and parents that like to nag them to “get a proper job/career/degree/haircut”
His back story reads like a fast track to instant mediumsville and the familiar reinforcement and mentoring is everywhere from an early age in volumes that go a long way as to explaining his speedier journey than most.
www.exacteditions.com/exact/browse/588/949/6000/3/14?dps=
It all starts at five, when Master Bartlett see’s a Victorian lady standing over his mother’s bed. He tells his grandmother who tells him its nothing out of the ordinary and there was nothing to worry about. Good advice you might think but she didn’t mean it was just a ordinary cause or any number of other possible reasons and then explained them to him …she meant It was normal because she was a psychic and claimed to have those experiences herself. And so it begins.
Grannies already reaffirming the paranormal as a path and sharing her experiences which is incredibly appealing and inclusive to a child so small when their whole world is what the people the trust and love tell them.
At 8 he attends his first meeting at a spiritualist church with his mother. He says he remembers keeping his experiences a secret from his friends and family fearing as any kid does at that age difference and exclusion. What more reassuring than to have your mother and those around you tell you its all real and not only that but they experience it too. Suddenly your included, part of something .The seeds are well and truly sewn.
By 11 Master Bartlett is into martial arts, a healthy diversion and one that might teach discipline but it also introduces him as he puts it to “energies”. Energies that he begins to misunderstand and attribute to spirits .The path continues.
At the same age he revels his secret infront to a classroom of his peers and gives his first message mimicking those he’s watched in spiritualist churches gain the plaudits and attention of the congregation, maybe his classmates will be as impressed as they are. Maybe they will think he is special and different too. He does, they no doubt do.
Things change however in the far crueller and cut and thrust world of secondary school. Its all a secret to be kept once again from the older and far more diverse kids he now has to mix with most of whom are strangers and who wont be so impressed.
Secrets mean isolation, feeling different isn’t good when your surrounded by those who appear to seamlessly just fit in. Funnily enough it’s at this time he begins to attend spiritualist church more regularly. He doesn’t have to keep any secrets there, they understand, they’re like him, there he is included and valued. The real affirmation and belief begins in earnest.
Then at 13 his grandmother dies, the woman he was so close to, who he shared all of this with, who showed him such love is gone. Something that shapes and affects all of us is the first loss of someone we love. It prompts Ross to research more, get involved more, and study more the whole spiritualist spectrum. Having previously just had an interest he now has a reason, a desire to contact someone he has lost himself.
Someone who deeply believed in it all just as he does now. All entirely understandable and something I can identify with myself.
By 14 he’s taking workshops and has joined a circle. His young mind is now subject to every little bit of influence and manipulation these things often bring. It’s now the mediums and the idea of being a medium is fully beginning to form in his mind and the minds of those around him.
At 15 he’s on a platform giving demonstrations, he’s picked up the mannerisms and the verbal of the many TV and stage mediums he’s studied and watched. He started to see what it can bring and Id wager his heads been turned even just a little bit by the perceived glamour of being a “personality” with the attention of a devoted audience.
He says “people say im an indigo child , that is to say someone who is highly evolved spiritually and whose specific purpose is to try and change the world at a time when we are coming into a spiritualist age- an age we are on the cusp of now”
And everything he has been told, everyway he has been shaped, everything he’s had reinforced and assured in him is encapsulated in that one sentence …a sentence that no 17 year old kid would ever conceive of saying otherwise.
Trying to install any rational thought or reversal of all of this belief is now subject to having to reverse almost 10 years worth of the opposite installed in him everyday in many different ways through his short life.
The result is a 17 year old kid standing in front of a desperate audience of grieving people believing he is talking to their dead and equally believing its fine to do so, to earn a living doing so, to roll his eyes and utter the stock phrases, to nervously pace up and down the stage in clothes he is uncomfortable in machine gunning clichés he isn’t even aware he has stolen from a hundred others like him.
The result is a 17 year old who has been given false importance, false hope and false ability attributed to him perhaps initially from a position of care and love but ultimately that has rendered him unable to question or think of anything other than what he now believes is his power, his ability, his importance and his uniqueness. Something that funnily enough has now opened up a career and a little potential for fame and money but most noticeably a rather ugly ambition that is juxtaposed with all the love and light reasons he may have had to get involved in the first place.
All he needs now is a manager ….wait that’s right he has one already.
The picture is now complete …and the reasons why a 17 year old lad is about to add to the numbers of career mediums plying their trade on the stages and tv screens out there.
Maybe his intentions are good, maybe he does really believe he can help people, I just can’t see how a manager,a website and head shots, or a pricelist indicate that .Mores to the point the poor readings and cliche riddled delivery and lack of any proof of ability mediumistic or entertainment wise certainly don't provide much in the way of help to the people he's standing before.
By Fluffet
You know when you think on what most 17 year olds get up to and spend their time on, traipsing around spiritualist churches performing to an audience of people by and large three times their age isn’t the first thing you think about.
It’s not even the tenth to be honest.
Which got me interested in why a 17 year old boy got so caught up in the medium game in the first place. Lets face it, it’s not exactly a clincher pastime in the dating stakes, nor is it likely to provide much in the way of street cred with the lads. Then there’s having to spend most of your time with people at least old enough to be your mother, granny, great granny …you get the picture. For one so young its hard to understand why they would want to spend their free time far less embark on a career that involves talking about and immersing yourself in everything that is well….dead.
There’s always the possibility of the answer being “because I want to help” and that may be a genuine belief in some who get into the world of woo but just as possible are the many less fluffy reasons that hold some significance in swapping the playstation for the planchette.
In many cases it takes a good few years of 30 something directionless pondering, a couple of major life crisis, or at least some sudden (coincidental of course) change in circumstance that leads the ex business person, chef, publican, plumber whatever to take to the small halls and back rooms of local Spiritualist churches or public houses in a bid to become the latest medium on the circuit. But there’s something unnerving about a kid fresh out of school yet to succumb to all that launching themselves out there as the next Colin Fry alike or Derek Acorah clone.
As I pondered this I found this article on Ross Bartlett Teen Psychic written by none other than his manager Norie Miles for Ghost Voices magazine and already that begins to hint at why this kid isn’t spending his time down the local in hangout and instead is in a ill fitting suit rolling his eyes and spinning out clichés that would make even Degsey cringe. 17 year old kids don’t have managers they have careers teachers and parents that like to nag them to “get a proper job/career/degree/haircut”
His back story reads like a fast track to instant mediumsville and the familiar reinforcement and mentoring is everywhere from an early age in volumes that go a long way as to explaining his speedier journey than most.
www.exacteditions.com/exact/browse/588/949/6000/3/14?dps=
It all starts at five, when Master Bartlett see’s a Victorian lady standing over his mother’s bed. He tells his grandmother who tells him its nothing out of the ordinary and there was nothing to worry about. Good advice you might think but she didn’t mean it was just a ordinary cause or any number of other possible reasons and then explained them to him …she meant It was normal because she was a psychic and claimed to have those experiences herself. And so it begins.
Grannies already reaffirming the paranormal as a path and sharing her experiences which is incredibly appealing and inclusive to a child so small when their whole world is what the people the trust and love tell them.
At 8 he attends his first meeting at a spiritualist church with his mother. He says he remembers keeping his experiences a secret from his friends and family fearing as any kid does at that age difference and exclusion. What more reassuring than to have your mother and those around you tell you its all real and not only that but they experience it too. Suddenly your included, part of something .The seeds are well and truly sewn.
By 11 Master Bartlett is into martial arts, a healthy diversion and one that might teach discipline but it also introduces him as he puts it to “energies”. Energies that he begins to misunderstand and attribute to spirits .The path continues.
At the same age he revels his secret infront to a classroom of his peers and gives his first message mimicking those he’s watched in spiritualist churches gain the plaudits and attention of the congregation, maybe his classmates will be as impressed as they are. Maybe they will think he is special and different too. He does, they no doubt do.
Things change however in the far crueller and cut and thrust world of secondary school. Its all a secret to be kept once again from the older and far more diverse kids he now has to mix with most of whom are strangers and who wont be so impressed.
Secrets mean isolation, feeling different isn’t good when your surrounded by those who appear to seamlessly just fit in. Funnily enough it’s at this time he begins to attend spiritualist church more regularly. He doesn’t have to keep any secrets there, they understand, they’re like him, there he is included and valued. The real affirmation and belief begins in earnest.
Then at 13 his grandmother dies, the woman he was so close to, who he shared all of this with, who showed him such love is gone. Something that shapes and affects all of us is the first loss of someone we love. It prompts Ross to research more, get involved more, and study more the whole spiritualist spectrum. Having previously just had an interest he now has a reason, a desire to contact someone he has lost himself.
Someone who deeply believed in it all just as he does now. All entirely understandable and something I can identify with myself.
By 14 he’s taking workshops and has joined a circle. His young mind is now subject to every little bit of influence and manipulation these things often bring. It’s now the mediums and the idea of being a medium is fully beginning to form in his mind and the minds of those around him.
At 15 he’s on a platform giving demonstrations, he’s picked up the mannerisms and the verbal of the many TV and stage mediums he’s studied and watched. He started to see what it can bring and Id wager his heads been turned even just a little bit by the perceived glamour of being a “personality” with the attention of a devoted audience.
He says “people say im an indigo child , that is to say someone who is highly evolved spiritually and whose specific purpose is to try and change the world at a time when we are coming into a spiritualist age- an age we are on the cusp of now”
And everything he has been told, everyway he has been shaped, everything he’s had reinforced and assured in him is encapsulated in that one sentence …a sentence that no 17 year old kid would ever conceive of saying otherwise.
Trying to install any rational thought or reversal of all of this belief is now subject to having to reverse almost 10 years worth of the opposite installed in him everyday in many different ways through his short life.
The result is a 17 year old kid standing in front of a desperate audience of grieving people believing he is talking to their dead and equally believing its fine to do so, to earn a living doing so, to roll his eyes and utter the stock phrases, to nervously pace up and down the stage in clothes he is uncomfortable in machine gunning clichés he isn’t even aware he has stolen from a hundred others like him.
The result is a 17 year old who has been given false importance, false hope and false ability attributed to him perhaps initially from a position of care and love but ultimately that has rendered him unable to question or think of anything other than what he now believes is his power, his ability, his importance and his uniqueness. Something that funnily enough has now opened up a career and a little potential for fame and money but most noticeably a rather ugly ambition that is juxtaposed with all the love and light reasons he may have had to get involved in the first place.
All he needs now is a manager ….wait that’s right he has one already.
The picture is now complete …and the reasons why a 17 year old lad is about to add to the numbers of career mediums plying their trade on the stages and tv screens out there.
Maybe his intentions are good, maybe he does really believe he can help people, I just can’t see how a manager,a website and head shots, or a pricelist indicate that .Mores to the point the poor readings and cliche riddled delivery and lack of any proof of ability mediumistic or entertainment wise certainly don't provide much in the way of help to the people he's standing before.
By Fluffet
