The reasons you gave were not very compelling. They all basically boil down to “Why would they lie to me?”
Hardly the most probable or even plausible one. We have ample evidence of mediums frequently being frauds, and no scientific evidence at all of aliens or spirits.
If you hear hoofbeats, it’s a bit more rational for your first thought to be “Horses!,” not “Ghost riders in the sky!” or “Ten-legged Betelgeusian riding beasts!”
coupled with, “…and if they were lying, I would know it of course.”
Well, for one thing, real Parmesan cheese is never 50% off.
What are some others?..
OK, the question I always come back to is: these ectopeople, why do they care? why should we think there is some sort of relevance between the planet and the ectoplanet? This really needs to be given serious consideration, it remains the major obstacle to this general branch of the paranormal.
I mean, grandma is gone, pushing flowers now, if she has some sort of persistent æthereal quintessence, is it not the utmost conceit to imagine that that entity has not “moved on to better things”? If the spirits are the formerly living, I just fail to see why we should expect that they would hang around. Emotions (“she wants you to know she cares about you”) are biochemical survival tools, there can be no comparable ectochemistry. Which goes, as well, for the anonymous entities that merely exist and float about (or swarm over your flesh like LRH’s “body-thetans”).
The “universal mind” is an interesting concept, but it too requires explanation. Not so much how it might exist (there seems to be a fair bit of wiggle-room in QM) but what you expect to get from it and why. Choices made at the point of a pendulum do not seem significantly more meaningful than choices made on one face of a coin. It is not clear to me how channeling would be better than due consideration and/or chance.
And it seems evident that there are things that will just not ever be within the reach of our understanding. This is a good thing, because it keeps us reaching. Filling in these questions with fiction is an affront to the beauty of the vast absurdity of it all, especially if it encourages us to accept the pat and stop trying to reach for understanding.
- Every medium that has ever been has always been faking it totally (consensus here by the looks of things),
Or,
------------------------------------------------ <– cross this line please if you can
At least some mediums are not faking it => information is not consciously coming from them. So it then could be coming from:
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The medium’s subconscious
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A collective common unconscious that the medium can access
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The ghost or spirit of a deceased person
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A multi-dimensional being
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An extra terrestrial
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A lower astral entity
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Some sort of concious being created by some of the combined thoughts / emotions of everyone
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God, Some Deity or other, Demons, Fairies, Elementals etc.
Can’t think of anything else at the minute.
The thing is, even if, say .01% of psychics/channelers/mediums are not faking it, there’s no way (if they won’t submit to actual scientific testing) to determine which ones are real and which are faking. So, in any case, it’s reasonable to presume that, without such scientific testing, anyone who claims such powers is faking it.
At the very least, you must agree that the vast majority of individuals who claim supernatural powers are either faking it or deluded about it, right?
Of all those possibilities, how would you rank them in terms of probabilities, most likely to least likely? Remember that only #1 and #2 have been show to exist so far.
Also, could a moderator please move this to a more appropriate forum?
Again, if the information gathered in indistinguishable from mundane information then you can never test your hypothesis. How is it possible to distinguish between bad information pulled from an extra-terrestrial being versus bad information pull from one’s own nether regions? The answer is you can’t.
Well, that’s why I said that arguing with you is hopeless. When the people on your side point out all the reasons why the entire very long history is filled with fraud and delusion and impossibilities and then conclude by saying “I believe anyway” no rational argument can possibly penetrate.
All that’s left is a long list of irrationalities. Which you’ve already supplied.
There’s no need for such absolute terms as “Every medium that has ever been has always been faking it totally”, because just past your line at item 2 you have your most likely answer for the non-fakers. Correction, unwitting fakers.
There doesn’t have to be willful deceit, especially when we consider the lies we tell ourselves. There’s an urgent need to assign meaning where there just might not be any. We invoke the paranormal and the supernatural to soften the edges of a pretty stark reality. There will be those willing to exploit that for personal gain, and those eager to be exploited for the comfort it gives them. And there are the deluded, self or otherwise.
In other words, someone can believe, with all their heart, that they are genuinely channeling some external force, and be stone cold wrong.
As I’ve stated above the material being channelled is not reliable at all, IMHO. So there’s no way to prove anything scientifically. And hence if you can accept that the material is bogus but not the challenging process itself, it is far from reasonable to assume that all are channellers are faking.
Unknown Source -> Information A -> Medium -> Information B -> Audience
If Information A is bogus, which may well be the case, Information B will be also, but the Medium is not faking.
How do you know? Why would you trust so absolutely your ability to determine who is faking or not, when such abilities are so unreliable, historically speaking?
Crossing that line is no more problematic than enjoying a good SciFi/Fiction novel. But having enjoyed the imaginary journey, I put down the book and don’t continue to indulge the possibility that those fantastic scenarios actually exist without some evidence for their existence. Why not hold clairvoyants and mediums to at least the same standard as magicians performing tricks? Why is new age mysticism of Deepak Chopra so much more awe inducing to people than the brilliant imagination and story telling skills of Isaac Azimov?
Since you’re evidently not interested in scientific answers, this question is not appropriate for General Questions. Moving to IMHO.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
9)Chickens could be telepathic, and messing with us
10)There might be lava creatures living under the Earth, accidentally beaming their thoughts to us
11)etc.
There’s no point speculating what might be the cause of a phenomenon that might exist, until it has actually been established that the phenomenon *does *in fact exist.
Pretty sure cats are fucking with us.
Henry,
One reason most of us here are sceptical of channelled material is that magicians have duplicated everything ‘psychics’ have done.
Also making money out of gullible clients has been going on for over a century - see Harry Houdini.
Modern magic performances are better than anything ‘mediums’ can come up. Also magicians are the best at investigaing tricksters: see Penn + Tellerand Derren Brown.
Cite?
None - not a one - of the great 19th century Spiritualists, occultists, mediums etc. I’ve come across during my research seem to have been motivated by greed, or a craving for notoriety. Not Britten, not Randolph, not Blavatsky (though she certainly didn’t mind a little notoriety), not Davis, not Davidson, not Besant, not Olcott, not Reuss, not Steiner, not Papus (also didn’t mind a little bit of notoriety), not Guaïta, not Péladan, not Boullan, not Lévi, not Wyld, not Crowley (fucking LOVED notoriety, and lots of it!), not Kingsford, not Mathers, not Felkin, not Yeats.
Same for the 18th century greats - with the possible exception of Cagliostro.
So when you claim that “a gigantic percentage of them have been outed as sheer frauds,” what exactly do you base that on?