dagblog - Comments for "A Psychic Got it Wrong. Who Knew?"

The point of my piece is that

Ramona — Thu, 16 May 2013 12:23:07 +0000

In reply to The same problem exists with

The point of my piece is that Sylvia Browne, a "psychic" who makes tons of money and has achieved a good amount of fame, told a terrified mother that her daughter was dead. It turned out to be untrue.

There are degrees of responsibility for your actions, even among the believers of the paranormal, I would think. When a psychic entertainer either takes herself so seriously she's willing to say out loud that a missing person is dead, or is willing to lie in front of the cameras, it's no longer just innocent amusement or a thrill up the spine. It's craven quackery.

I've had decent experiences

Michael Maiello — Thu, 16 May 2013 02:20:32 +0000

In reply to I have some fragments of a

I've had decent experiences with Tarot and I-Ching. You imbue the objects with meaning and, voila, they become meaningful. I don't know that there's anything wrong with this. Props have their uses.

The same problem exists with

Elusive Trope — Tue, 14 May 2013 00:33:22 +0000

In reply to I've had a similar experience

The same problem exists with therapists, There are some quacks out there, some using proven methods, some using questionable experimental techniques, and some using pure crappie approaches. There is unfortunately more of a buyers beware in these fields.

So does this mean that I may

jollyroger — Mon, 13 May 2013 23:49:27 +0000

In reply to There was a major grand

So does this mean that I may return to selling indulgences or not?

Bad sign #2: when your

jollyroger — Mon, 13 May 2013 23:43:05 +0000

In reply to As all the online ?how to

Bad sign #2: when your diabetic kundalini guru Swami Muktananda's mattress is turned, 3000 Snickers wrappers are found hidden thereunder...

As all the online ?how to

ocean-kat — Mon, 13 May 2013 19:57:02 +0000

In reply to There was a major grand

As all the online “how to recognize a fake guru or a false prophet” websites warn: it’s a bad sign when your guru exhibits greediness and accumulates expensive possessions

Yeah, that's a good sign. Here's another. When a guru spends most of their time talking about superpowers, how he has them and how he can teach you how to get them in just 3 years he's probably a fake guru. Even if while he's talking about them he says they're not important. This reads like a "forget about the other gurus cause I'm the true guru you should be spending your money on "

You can take anyone and teach them breathing practices and in less than three years they'll have lots of superpowers but without samadhi.

Want to know more? I offer an academic level, intensive course called STAGES. This is the last week I'm accepting applications. Read the Stages course page on the site if you're interested. If not, that's okay, too, as there are tons of free materials on the website. I'm only looking for the brightest of the brightest anyway.

(What a lucky coincidence I clicked this link today because its the last week and next week all the ads for his wonderful course will be gone.)

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I will say that by the time you're done with this course, you will: Understand how various psychic abilities and supernormal powers come about, and will have the means to explain a tremendous variety of hitherto unexplained mystical, metaphysical or paranormal spiritual phenomena

There is a catch, however, which is that not everyone can take this course.

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There was a major grand

artappraiser — Mon, 13 May 2013 17:37:20 +0000

In reply to Interesting. I stand

There was a major grand larceny case in NYC for "cleansing money" that finished up last week--article mentions that fortune telling alone is just a misdemeanor. I get a kick out of this part of the NYT article, identification with what many preachers do:

Outside the courtroom, a man who declined to give his name but who said he was Ms. Miller’s husband said the woman had benefited from his wife’s help for more than a year before she was asked for money.

“She is a victim of prejudice,” the man said of Ms. Miller. “My wife brought her to Jesus and changed this woman’s life. Her father was cured of cancer.”

The New York Observer has a nice intro to their telling of the story, starting out as a given that fortune tellers are just a subset of a larger tribe:

How do you know if your spiritual guru is leading you astray? Well, if she tells you that she needs at least two Rolexes and $600,000 in cash to ward off the devil, it may be a sign that she is not on the level.

As all the online “how to recognize a fake guru or a false prophet” websites warn: it’s a bad sign when your guru exhibits greediness and accumulates expensive possessions, and it’s a really bad sign when your spiritual guru exhibits greediness towards your expensive possessions.

But phony soothsayers and fake spiritual leaders have been preying on the bewildered, befuddled and wealthy since time immemorial,....

and that the law doesn't play favorites here:

“Larceny is larceny, no matter what form it takes—fraud by a spiritual advisor is no different than fraud committed by an attorney, an accountant, or any other person who gains an individual’s trust in order to steal from him or her,” District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. wrote in a release about the conviction.

I've had a similar experience

ocean-kat — Mon, 13 May 2013 06:03:05 +0000

In reply to I have some fragments of a

I've had a similar experience with tarot cards and other spiritual practices. I'm something of a skeptic and I try not to fall into confirmation bias but I think whenever one takes any practice seriously and practices with due diligence things start happening that just can't be logically explained.

There's this bible passage: Ask and you shall receive, seek and you shall find, knock and the door will be opened unto you. Christians of course think it means if you seek Christ he will respond. But I think it doesn't matter in what way you knock, if the practice is taken seriously and sufficient time and energy is put into it, "spirit" or whatever will open the door in ways congruent with the path and practice you're working on in surprising ways.

That being said I do think many, perhaps even most, of the people in the business are running a scam. I'm just not sure how you create laws that separate the scammers from those doing good work and helping people.

Interesting. I stand

Michael Wolraich — Mon, 13 May 2013 03:16:43 +0000

In reply to Actually there are. There are

Interesting. I stand corrected. Illegal in NYC too, apparently.

I have some fragments of a

Elusive Trope — Sun, 12 May 2013 19:56:36 +0000

In reply to I once had a long interview

I have some fragments of a blog with which I am tinkering about, in part, my experience reading tarot cards for friends. I had started with some friend back toward the end of my college days bringing a tarot card deck to the bar a group of us were hanging out in. At first, the readings were merely a kind of parlor game, the kind of one played by liberal arts majors slumming it in a dive bar, who treated everything with a post-post-modern facetiousness (something about the laugh laughing at the laugh laughing).

But for a few of us, the readings turned into a sort of therapy session. It becomes impossible for it not to when one actually wants to take the comments seriously. None of us would say that we actually believed the cards were a source of divination, or that it provided a way for the forces of whatever to answer an inquiry.

Yet when the reader tells the inquirer that 2 of Swords is in the "conscious influence" spot of the spread, which suggests that the inquirer is primarily focused on or one's thoughts are being primarily influnced by blocked emotions and a sense of stalemate, the inquirer inevitably finds his or herself asking "is that true?" Or "In what way is true, and not true?"

A tarot reading between friends (even if some of them are majoring in clinical therapy of some sort) is not the same thing as therapy. The therapeutic relationship is unique, in many ways it is one of the most unique of social relationships. But for a brief moment, an individual contemplating the topic of "just what is it that is pre-occupying my consciousness (as well as the subconscious, the forces at work on one's self from the outside, etc)?" is pretty much the same regardless of whether that individual is in a therapy session or having a tarot reading.

The possibility of positive consequences of such an act of reflection are there in both situations. Usually the people I did readings for came away stating that situation(s) that were bothering them were more clear, both in clarity about the situation and clarity about the best way forward.

With that said, if one does enough readings, there are way too many times the interpretation of the cards come up damn near perfectly aligned with what the inquirer's actual situation, and any suggestions to make the best of the situation appear to be the best path (i.e. if one's therapist had made the suggestion, people would generally agree that the therapist had been right on the money).

Moreover, doing readings for particular individual multiple times, the cards had an eerie way of giving each individual a consistent reading over time that reflected the individual's changing situation.

So while no one would claim that he or she actually believed in the tarot cards, we all respected the cards. Which was a way of saying we weren't going to claim there were no unknown forces at work, forces that could help illuminate the way to getting closer to a good life.