How should the psychic community address the unscrupulous practices by those who use the "gift" to exploit?
What should a person reasonable expect from a psychic session?
What red flags should a person be aware of?
I think the psychic community shouldn't be bothered by it. The people who claim to have the ability or use the gift to make money have always been there and they always will be. I think they should let their friends and loved ones know how to tell the difference... if they're friends and loved ones would ever be interested in going to a psychic, that is. I mean, I would never discuss something like this with my family except two members. O_O
As for what a reasonable person should expect is entertainment.
I wouldn't expect anything life altering from one unless they could actually tell me something or prove themselves to me somehow.
Red flags to look for are asking open ended questions just fishing for information. They person starting to say something and pausing, waiting for you to interject the rest of the sentence. Things like that.
Good questions.
How should the psychic community address the unscrupulous practices by those who use the "gift" to exploit?
My answer: It's your gift, nobody should dictate how you use it. If you are harming someone from it, of course it should be addressed but everybody that has "gifts" use them to one extent or another, be it job related, sports...what makes having psychic talents any different?
What should a person reasonably expect from a psychic session?
To pick up things about you personally and your surroundings without you really having to say anything at all. If they are that good, they can tell you simply by being around you, sensing you, connecting to your being. I know others that are very well capable of doing it.
What red flags should a person be aware of?
Like the person above mentioned, don't talk too much, or give out too much information for them to use. Don't take everything said at face value. Sometimes it's not 100% accurate.
here's an article on two of the founders of deception.
http://www.prairieghosts.com/foxsisters.html
I have grown up where there were card readers and fortune tellers on late-night tv. And here in my town there is even one psychic reader. These people dont bother me one bit. I honestly dont put much stock in their ability's.
They might know a few tricks when it comes to reading tarot cards, or crystals, but I know that the majority in the public eye hold little uumph.
As of recently however (mind you we are talking in the last week or so) Ive been meaning to pop in my towns sooth-sayer to see if they saw me coming. But Ive been lazy.
I don't have a problem with the idea of making money using your "gifts". I don't think however that people should charge huge fee's or turn into the equivalent of a televangelist lol.
From my understanding communities tend to be formed by those with abilities within a certain city or region and that reputation is a big deal. If someone is legit and good to those that ask for help then their business will grow.
There's always 2 sides to every situation, the peddler of false hope and the "customer" who allows themselves to be suckered into something. People should always do their homework and use their gut feelings, if someone is demanding $200 up front and only offers a vague notion of what they do then leave.
In the end though it's still a matter of chance. There will always be people who take advantage of others, the key is to go into the situation armed with knowledge and to guard yourself against being duped.
From a legal perspective I'm not sure there's anything that really could be done unless you have proof of a real and large scam going on. Those in the psychic community however can always join together and try to sound the alarm and warn others.
In my expereience a "donation" is requested AFTER a reading and only if you're happy with it (not that you got good news but that you felt the reading was genuine).
Gaving done readings, avaoid someone who will not give you a negative reading, even if it's the truth.
..as with any business, if you are planning to conduct any business with them, you should check it out. Yes, this people, tend to know use a lot of manipulation and for sure know what the paying person want to hear. There is absolutely any human who got blood in their vein, that can predict the future of anybody. Take to the bank. the reading of card or whatever they decide to read, is always fake. please, is just a business to make money.
You need to be careful about accusing people is misuse of psychic gifts, unless you've positive proof and evidence. U say try to develop your own psychic abilities in the areas where you're most effective
MasterMel2: you wrote : "You need to be careful about accusing people is misuse of psychic gifts, unless you've positive proof and evidence". Are you referring to me or to the member above me, Xzavier.
Yes, for some people, what ever this psyche people tend to tell them, they believe it. well, everybody is free to use their money any way they want to. I still say, is just a "mambo wambo" to get you to open your wallet.
Mel, there are plenty of examples of people who perpetrate fraud as psycics, gypsies are notorious at swindling people out of money, Sylvia Brown charges 350 dollars a reading, and all people get is a spiel.
While this observation will not likely be appreciated in such a credulous community as this one... yet for me, the red flag is already inherent to the title, itself. If someone claims to be a psychic and solicits themself as such...you can pretty much be assured, you're about to be defrauded.
I don't like people that go on a brag about it. Most of them use educated guessing and are really good at reading body language. If you watch them all they do is give the most vague answers possible in relation to how you carry yourself and speak. Anyone can be on the money in that regard. A monkey could do it.
If you do have a "gift" I don't think you should charge for it either. Everyone is always going on about helping their fellow man... Why would you take money from someone who truly needs to hear some of the things that really weren't said before? That's cruel. If you truly can see and hear, I think you should offer it up just to be a good person. Exploiting others just to make a quick buck on something that should be made common knowledge if you've got it is just wrong. I bet if they didn't have sight they wouldn't want someone making them pay $60 just to hear their loved ones are happy where they're at. It's ridiculous.
I'm sorry for ranting but the ones on tv just..... they tick me off! They're all quacks and fakes.
I have some friends who perform psychic readings and they're pretty good at it. There have been some I can avoid just by the way they answer questions I ask them first. I remember the Ms.Clei woman years ago, and then this gyt John Edwards. I always thought there was something wring about him.
James Van Pregg, and John Edward both are all about promoting their books, books filled with mumbo Jumbo about how in-tune they are to the afterlife. All they offer is vague notions to people in grief. They pray on the grieving.
A good book to read is "The Psychic Mafia" written by a once famous medium who came clean about what really happens behind the scenes in the medium, and psychic world. M. Lemar Keene
Funny How "Harry" Houdini was famous for exposing phony mediums.
The Fos sisters( the original "mediums") personally confessed to using trickery to appear to be communicating with the dead. The Davenport brothers where the most dubious of seance mediums exposed by Harry, he went so far as to mimic all the effects on stage that were popular at seances.
The other phenomena that has popped up in the last decade is people that make claims to "tune" people into their own psychic powers, psychic fairs are a very profitable, and when people are left wanting they are simply told that they failed because they lack in faith, or belief. I met one girl who had two bookshelves filled with books, and a chest filled with items that where touted as beacons for metaphysical expansion. Yet she remained depressed because she wasn't experiencing anything dynamic in her intuition.
I should note that I personally accept Readers that perform as entertainment, the best reader I met was in Oregon on Campus she would do readings for Sorority, and Frat parties strictly as a mixer activity, and in that respect she excelled, and "mystified" her sitter.
We all see what we choose to see or accept, yet sometimes the readings lead us to make them correct by our actions.
some times yes but some physcics are only there to con people who have gone to them for help
A s a performer Derren Brown can even astonish self professed psychic instructors, should "Psychic admit that its all a scam?
"cross my hands with silver dearie..."
to be succinct, the exchange of money, for knowledge is where one gets suss.
performers are showing the public routines, and shows that duplicate what the community does, or claims to do. and they do so with no claim of mystic powers. working under a cloak of mystic should up the success of "True psychics".
I am a psychic and have giving a lot of reading , I avoid love readings, I also do not charge . A real psychic does not charge they help others for fee but only reasonable readings. I do not sugar coat like some readers do. I found more on peddlers
Peddlers
Dictionary of American History | 2003 | Marler, Scott P. | 700+ words | Copyright
PEDDLERS
PEDDLERS. Also known as hawkers or chapmen, peddlers were itinerant merchants who roamed the country when its interior markets were still underdeveloped and extremely diffuse. Beginning in the colonial period, such men—frequently of New England origin—traveled from farm to farm with their trunks strapped on their backs or, as roads improved, in wagons. Trunk peddlers who sold smaller items like combs, pins, cheap jewelry, knives and woodenware, knitted goods, and books (Parson Mason Weems of Virginia, Washington's biographer, was an itinerant bookseller) usually tended to be "on their own hooks"—independent entrepreneurs who owned their stock. Most were willing to barter their wares in exchange for farm products from their cash-strapped and isolated rural customers (many early Indian fur traders were in this sense little more than peddlers), then carry those goods for resale at a cash profit in country stores and town markets.
Beginning in the late eighteenth century many peddlers, especially in the burgeoning tinware trade, were "staked" by small northern manufactories who paid them a percentage of sales, sometimes even a flat wage. The importance of these "Yankee peddling companies" as a primitive but effective distribution system for durable goods is demonstrated by the wooden shelf-clock industry
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of early-nineteenth-century Connecticut. Mass production processes perfected by Eli Terry allowed thousands of clocks to be manufactured annually by a single workshop, increases that would have been of little use without the marketing prowess of the Yankee peddler to transport, explain, and sell (often "on time") the luxury items. The folklore surrounding the fictional Sam Slick attests to the ubiquity of the antebellum clock peddler; by the 1840s one traveler to the frontier South remarked that "in every cabin where there was not a chair to sit on there was sure to be a Connecticut clock."
The character of Sam Slick also underscores the outsider status of the Yankee peddler (who began to be supplanted in the late 1830s by large numbers of German Jewish emigrants), which made them targets of suspicion and hostility, especially in the South. Men resented peddlers' intrusions into the household (particularly seductive sales pitches directed to their wives); established merchants complained about the threat peddlers ostensibly presented to local trade. Fears of abolitionist-fueled slave insurrections led to widespread attempts to regulate "foreign" itinerant merchants through onerous licensing fees in the 1830s, although such legislation had antecedents in the colonial era.
Anti-peddler laws were also promulgated in many northern states during the mid-nineteenth century, and such legislation—along with the rise of wholesale distribution networks (and, later in the century, corporate "traveling salesmen")—led to the decline of rural peddling in the North by the Civil War. But peddling persisted well into the twentieth century in pockets of the rural South, notably under the auspices of the W. T. Rawleigh Company and the J. R. Watkins Medical Company. Peddlers who sold goods, such as furniture, on installment credit also remained common in the immigrant communities of northern cities through the 1920s.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Jaffee, David. "Peddlers of Progress and the Transformation of the Rural North, 1760–1860." Journal of American History 78, no. 2 (September 1991): 511–535.
Jones, Lu Ann. "Gender, Race, and Itinerant Commerce in the Rural New South." Journal of Southern History 66, no. 2 (May 2000): 297–320.
Rainer, Joseph T. "The Honorable Fraternity of Moving Merchants: Yankee Peddlers in the Old South, 1800–1860." (Ph.D. diss., College of William and Mary, 2000.)
Scott P.Marler
So my question to you(As a practicing psychic) still remains, what should be said to clients about unscrupulous psychics?
It should be said that some fortune tellers/mediums simply go by the emotional responses and body language of their customer to make "predictions" and thereby appear to be genuine.
First one should truly ask themselves what would they do with power if they had it? a lot of pretentious or "trying-to-look-good" people will say, they will use it for good but if you think about how people use cars to make their travels easier, dishwashers to do the washing for them then its likely that people would use it for personal gain and to make their life easier, I know I would though I would use psychic gifts as a means to ends first.
As I recently mentioned in a message, there is some money waiting for those who can prove that they have powers.
I once checked out a telekinetic site once and it was not about how one can be telekinetic but how a person claiming to be one can pull of their stunts, one out of many answers was temperature and the changes it has on the room. I can't remember the site's name otherwise I would post the link here as it was quite interesting.
I have friends who sometimes go to fortune tellers to get readings, they are skeptical themselves so I tell them that they should not give anything away either through verbal information or emotional responses.
for anyone thinking of seeking the guidance of a reader I would first suggest they stop and think of why they feel the need to go to one in the first place.
What are the questions that they feel need to be answered. can they get those questions answered in more than one place, to compare the answers with.
How does one know what a fair price is for a service that they feel they need or seem to want?
I have a lot of questions in regards to this subject, and of course a lot of hesitation.
That's why I feel the entertainment label needs to be pronounced,anyone expecting clinical type insight has invested to much into psychic matters.
When I was young and far from jaded, I learned about my gift. But as I delt with others who claimed and actually with the gift I learned that the world is full of fraud the only thing those have the gift can do is watch and if the fraud is causing harm take those who it harms aside and help them out. now heres the jaded part sometimes its not even worth helping some times people are so full of dumb, that you just have to set them aside and let them do what they are going to do.
Well, I am clairaudient. I hear voices and music in my physical ear, not in my head. If someone has a gift why shouldn't they make money from it?
Unfortunately you have people that make up a shitload of stuff and sell it to you. That is wrong on so many levels.
Yes there are charlatans out there, but that doesn't mean that some people don't have a gift.
It depends on what gift though, Someone who is merely extremely intuitive and can read people like a book, can work off by what they see and thus appear psychic.
Dabs the author of this thread, posted a good vid about a person claiming to be telekinetic, he was exposed by james randi as a fake when they asked him to demonstrate his abilities with certain controls.
His pencil trick was debunked as the slightest movement in the area caused the pencil to move and his page turning was likely done by blowing it. When asked to turn the pages again with foam placed nearby so that if he used his breath, it would move the foam as well, he had a major epic failure as people today like to say. As of today, he is serving a 17 year sentence for another crime he committed.
If a person is using their so called gift for fame and profit - it's a giveaway that they may not be kosher.
Hey sometimes one needs to make profit, If I have to use my gift to get money to feed my son you damn skippy I will. but that's a rarity. I can easily make a blade and make more money from it lol
This is an interesting topic. I believe that a one that says they are psychic is someone you need to look out for. Some people have abilities, don't get me wrong but they are easily explainable by science. These abilities are connected to the cause and effect rule of life. If you know enough of what to look for you can predict just about anything. Businesses use the method to predict trends. It can be vague or extremely specific, it all just depends on how much background you have on the subject, and influencing factors. People that are capable of doing this don't claim the title of psychic.
A psychic is a person who claims to have an ability to perceive information hidden from the normal senses through extrasensory perception, or who is said by others to have such abilities. Where in reality it is not hidden from the normal senses, it is just the ability to connect the dots that sets them apart.
I gave seen some great advices from many about this issue. And I had some experience with people who really just reading their customers. thank you for all the good advice.
I only USE mediums for entertainment, I find what some are able to do as quiet fascinating where as with others, it's just embarrassing. I normally go to a hall where they give readings to people...(one pays 3 pounds and gets a cup of tea and a biscuit with a possible reading)
I would not pay anymore than a fiver for someone to tell me what I already know may or may not happen.
Agora the money I pay is for the cost of the hall, food and drink. Although the medium(s) would/could still be making money dependent on the size of the audience. However, £3 is under the cost of a cinema ticket, a pint of lager, a gallon of fuel......so it's not a'lot of dosh to fork out on entertainment for a couple of hours.
Well if it is for entertainment purposes I would just watch crossing over, lol.
I agree with that lol... I don't believe that if you've been blessed with a psychic gift that you should use it for entertainment........ buuuuut in todays mundain society, entertainment is everything... at least in America. So, really... I don't have a problem with the idea of making money... so long as it's not a bad experience... all of this is just me though.
Very broad answers especially with a questioning tone are major signs of a fake.