I was having a look around the website and I read in one of the forums were you said that you trained as a medium for 6 months, then you done platform work and then you found out this was all a scam? Am I right in what I read?
Close enough.
I was a skeptic, I had been exposing psychics for a few years, and I was doing a radio interview in London in a BBC studio, also on the show was a medium. So obviously we clashed a bit. The problem came when she called me an armchair skeptic (or something similar) and asked me "how can you call it bullsh1t when you have never tried it".
And to be fair she was 100% right. Like 99.9999% of skeptics out there, I had not tried it, I had not put myself in the position of a medium. So she challenged me to come to her centre and join the other students she had to learn mediumship and so on. Now I later found out that she fully expected me not to turn up, make excuses and so on, but she had never met someone like me, because at the class the next week, I drove 50 odd miles, and turned up at the center.
I did everything, but i NEVER EVER cheated, and I know how, even back then I knew how to cold read, hot read, and so on, but I decided that I would not cheat and see what happened. And guess what I was top of the class. I never believed what I did was real, and I understood the psychology behind things, but damn I felt the power that psychics must feel when you have someone in tears face to face with you 100% believing you are in contact with their dead loved one.
To cut a long story short, by the time I finished the course the cocky medium was in tears, her whole belief system in pieces. She stopped her "expert" classes that were being taught by someone else after I showed her they were cold reading. And within 6 months she had closed down the centre, quit mediumship and is now helping save abandoned and abused dogs across Europe.
I like to think that through knowing me and listening to me I had a lot to do with opening her eyes, and breaking her delusions apart.
Im not gonna name the medium, as she doesn't do it now, and it would not be fair to drag her name up again, she has moved on and i am happy with that.
The lineage of the teachings I received were things passed down and taught by various mediums, and originally came from Gordon Higginson.
Also I never gave readings to "civilians" only to other trainee mediums. And even this was hard for me as no one other than the main medium in charge knew who I was, what I did, and my knowledge etc. It is hard to know something is fake but have to go along with it. I never took payment, in fact it cost my money to travel there and so on, although I refused to pay for the course since I was challenged.
In the US a psychic and a medium is pretty much the same thing.
In the UK they are more pedantic, and you will see silly things like "all mediums are psychic but not all psychics are mediums"
Basically a medium communicates with the dead in various ways, a psychic picks up on vibrations, sees the past, future, can astral travel and so on.
I use psychic as a catch all term cause i know it pisses spiritual types off.
Also incase you are interested in more details, I wrote a 7 page featured spread for the Skeptic Magazine back in the day that covered the course
www.skeptic.org.uk/magazine/previous/2008/volume-21-number-4-winter-2008/And at that time, and to this day, there is not another skeptic in the UK who has done what I have done, a few have said they would (Dr. Matthew Smith one example) but no one has gone through with it.
So if you see me being an arrogant sod here and there, it is just my way to try and convince more skeptics to actually get off their butt and do what I did and have a true understanding of things from both sides
