One of the issues you face as a medium is whether to go public or not. I remember when I first started becoming involved in mediumship and spiritual development. I was somewhat reluctant to let people know that I was involved, because I didn’t know if they would accept it. Mediumship is one of those things that everyone reacts to differently – that is, you don’t know how someone is going to take it until you’ve already told them. I’ve had an experience or two where it wasn’t received well, which only goes to illustrate the point.
Over time, I became more comfortable with it. Telling people still gives me a twinge of anxiety becuase of the misunderstandings people carry around in their heads about it, but that’s just part of how it goes for me. My feelings about it at this point are that I don’t go out of my way to promote it, but on the other hand do not deny it. So if you were to put “going public” on a scale from closed to moderate to wide open, I’m in the moderate camp.
I think one of my issues with going public is that I don’t feel like hearing cynicism from acquaintences and others I know. It’s like getting criticism from unexpected places when you didn’t ask for it to begin with. It’s that rule of irony that once enough people know about it, you’ll get someone in your face who has an agenda to shoot down your perspective. And it’s not that I can’t “fight back” in a shooting match. Actually, I have learned a good bit about it and can discuss it, which is a point of personal pride for me. I’m more prepared than the average Spiritualist for such a discussion, and have helped other Spiritualists who get caught in shooting matches. It’s more that I would like to avoid it.
I think the lesson for me to learn is to just say “So what, deal with it. Let the chips fall where they may.” This is hard for me because I don’t like the idea that (some of them) will run about with a distorted perception of me, based on their lack of understanding. More accurately, these folks already have the distorted understanding and aren’t likely to want to correct it, and I don’t want to be an example of it in their head.
But Helen Thomas from down under says it rather well - “I have let go of the fear of what people might think of me. I know that there are people who won’t get it and I know that there are people who will always be skeptics.”
I should look it at is being no different than letting the world know you’re a musician or artist, and besides, the famous mediums have all done it and survived…
It’s something to work on…..
Here is an article about the Ouija board. It adds some perspectives and ideas that I hadn’t thought about before in the context of Ouija. I also discovered that Bil Wilson, one of the founders of Alcohol Anonymous, was very involved in it and also received the now-famous 12-step program ideas from the spirits..
I’ve worked with the Ouija board quite a bit, and a few years ago, with the help of the spirit folks, I developed a new board. They told me that a pencil would be good as a pointer, because they could see the graphite in it pretty well, no matter how thin it was. I hadn’t heard of it before they told me, so it was neat to read the article and learn that other people have been told the same thing.
Here is an interesting response to the question of whether animals perceive spirits. The writer is Laura Stinchfield, who is a pet psychic.
I believe that animals percieve spirits too, just as we do, or perhaps, even clearer than we do. I think we overlook this because we’re a little too human-centric. We really think it’s all about us. The world is far bigger and more dynamic than we can imagine, and all we do is concern ourselves with our little corner of it as if the rest didn’t exist.
From the windows of my home office, I often watch the sparrows. They land on the telephone lines, and the roof of the garage next door all the time. They have no idea that their sitting on phone lines – to them, it’s as good as any other branch they might sit on. Phone lines have no meaning in their world. It’s a whole system of thought that does not apply to them. Now, if you really think it’s all about you, then you see this as a limitation on their part, they’re not advanced enough to understand such things, and that’s lesser, or somehow bad. I find it liberating instead. They interact with the things of “our” world, but are not bound by it the way we are. They do not have any limiting conceptions of it, because they have no conceptions at all about it.
The above article refers to miscarriage in a spiritual way. Somehow, the physical fits into the spiritual, but we have no idea how. We’re just like the sparrows on the phone lines.
Don’t you think that there are plenty of other systems and dynamics that we aren’t aware of, just like the sparrows and the phone lines?
