The Medium Is The Message
As some of you may have read from earlier posts, I came across a medium called Marcel Cairo, who has a blog called I done thunk and hosts his professional dealings on a site called after life medium.
I highlighted that aside from his obvious interest in the duality theory of mind, is scathing on his on side about mediums he perceives as fake, and links to blogs from skeptics. An interesting chap, I decided, open to considering contrary views, rather than starting from the viewpoint that he must invariably be right.
In earlier conversations, he also provided an intriguing interpretation of skepticism:
Also, a true skeptic is one that searches for wisdom and understanding from a subjective point of view. The key word here is “searchesâ€. Most people who call themselves “skeptic†are either very stagnant in their quest for truth, or suffer from the herd mentality. So therefore, I am a skeptic. I am always on that search.Marcel Cairo
Anyway, after some back and forth conversation, he volunteered to do a phone reading for me, for free, that I could talk about on my website. We’ve just completed that today. It took two hours, and Marcel phoned me so he was getting absolutely bugger-all out of the deal, and it was taking up his time.
There’s a lot to take in — not all of which I want to make public, and some of which relates to other people, so I want to discuss matters with them before I talk about it. But I do want to talk about it.
When we were busy trying to arrange the reading, Marcel asked me to be open-minded, as I had explained I was skeptical but open to the possibility:
Truthfully, I really don’t care if I succeed in changing your mind one way or the other. That’s just between you and you. To me every reading is an experiment in proving consciousness survival. Obviously, some experiments will work out better than others. However, I want you to keep this in mind. Readings are a three point connection. You, me and spirit. We all are equally important in the experiment, so please come in with an open “let’s see what happens attitudeâ€, rather than “let’s see if this guy is a fraud†attitude.Marcel Cairo
I had already decided this guy was not a fraud. After all, what’s in it for him if he is? At best, he might get one or two links to his site: at worst I’d tell everyone he was rubbish. He’s not a fraud. You can set your mind at rest on that one at least.
This then changes the question: either he’s mistaken, or he’s capable of talking to the dead (or of somehow tapping into other people’s knowledge). For the sake of argument, I’m including “is cheating but doesn’t realise it” in the “mistaken” section here.
What do I think? My gut reaction? I don’t know. I get the feeling Marcel felt that he was having “a bad day at the office” while doing my reading, but he came up with a number of interesting points that I think would have been difficult to come up with without some sort of “insider” knowledge.
I’m confident he wasn’t cheating because although I have a family tree on my site, it’s very linear, and I’ve not “bushed it out” with side branches. Not to mention the fact that it’s so out of date it thinks I have one child. Marcel had specifically told me he’d seen the link to that, but he wasn’t going to look at it. Now, it could presumably be an elaborate double bluff, but why specifically point out that he’d seen it if he intended to look at it? Furthermore, you’d think if he was going to look at it, he’d have casually dropped in a name or to from it. Which he didn’t.
So, I’ve not yet made up my mind whether it’s all coincidence, or genuine evidence for something. I would certainly say that on initial reflection, it appears that Marcel may have had a better day at the office than we initially thought, though…
But watch this space — when I’ve had the time to consider, discuss and check up details I don’t know about in more detail, I’ll keep you informed!
Hello. I am 
Like you, I’m completely open-minded on this one.
I believe there are frauds.
There are those like Paul McKenna who know exactly how to fool people and make no bones about it.
There are those who genuinely believe they can do it but are unconsciously Paul McKennas.
Then there just may be a few…….
I’d be interested to know your outcome.
I was interested in Spiritualism for a while and I think there are many mediums whgo genuinely believe they are able to tap into messages from the spirit world. Whether or not they actually can is another matter. I think there are probably others who are frauds, good at “cold reading” teacniques too (Derren Brown’s book has some interestiong sections on this). If they were in real contact surely it would be easy to come up with lots of concrete, completely convincing stuff, not just vague hit-and-miss stuff with the odd bit that “seems quite interesting”. If they said : right, there’s a spirit here called Frank Smith, who says he died last year of lung cancer in Leeds and wants to talk to his wife Joan etc etc or - if it’s a private reading - it was all solid stuff that all made sense and the medium could not possibly have known, then there would be no debate and we’d know there was an afterlife. Otherwise the “wishful thinking” side of things seems the strongest to me at the moment. When I used to go to meetings in my mid 20s I’d often get messages saying I was very spiritual and was going through a bit of a difficult patch and searching for answers and doing a lot of reading etc.. all of which is not that unlikely to “ring true” to a young person attending a Spititualist meeting. I never heard anything that seemed like solid evidence as far as I can remember.