Do you believe some people have the gift of being able to talk to spirits?

[Funkyslippers]

I'm a non believer because nobody has ever convinced me otherwise. Even if the medium is correct on a lot if things how is it even possible for them to communicate with spirits? I'd love to hear people's opinions. This has come off the back of visiting a very well recommended so-called medium who was clutching at straws all the way through and in the end I left early & she didn't charge me!

Yep. #BeKind often actually means 'Shut up, you are not entitled to an opinion, even if it's factually correct or perfectly reasonable.'

Thankfully your opinion is completely unimportant to me.

If you're interested, there is a non profit organisation that carries out scientific tests on Mediums and Mediumship called The Windbridge Institute in Arizona. They use triple blind peer reviewed studies and their findings are very interesting and available online.

lol

Important enough for you to reply. 🙃

I think you are.

4 years of extensive research. 🧐

Yes I believe

No. We are no more special than every ant or fish. All just cells and a brain controlled by hormones which decays once dead.

Of course not. 🙄

Hmm, personally I've no experience. My mum did however, she was dragged into going to a "fortune teller " via my aunt. It was a last minute thing (someone else cancelled) and she told her things noone else could have known (eg. I see you have a tumour in your womb- don't worry, it has no roots). Mum had had a molar pregnancy at the time, and was being monitored for potential cancer. The only people who knew were her and my dad, her own mum didn't even know. It spooked her out

My dad died before I was two & I remember my mam going to many over the years out of sheer grief & desperation, I think it's such a crock of shit but if someone gets some comfort then I suppose leave them to it but I think it's exploitative

No. The two people I know who believe it's a thing are daft as a brush.

I took DH’s gran to one once as she believed in this stuff. The woman came out with a load of nonsense that didn’t apply at all to gran’s life. Now gran had a strong West Country rural accent and was in her 90s. At one point the woman said ‘there were horses in your life when you were younger’.
When we got out gran said the woman’s connection to the spirit world wasn’t strong but then again how did she know about the horses! 😮

Hmm I'm an excellent cold reader. I've worked in sales for decades, grew up in a very abusive family and I'm a masking autistic. I notice and remember everything.

I've seen three mediums out of curiosity having lost someone very close who was a believer. The first two provided absolutely no proof and didn't even mention the person I'd lost. So I wrote off the idea it was possible to communicate this way and they're all just charlatans.

Then I lost another very close relative and saw another medium recommended by a friend as being 'incredibly accurate'. His waiting list was a year long. And almost everything he said was true BUT 90% of it was incredibly generic.

He did correctly and immediate identify the two family members I'd lost most recently and how they died but spent a long time describing their deaths. Other than sudden and accidental deaths, the details around death itself are very similar. Everyone struggles to breathe at the end, everyone's heart stops.

He came close with one if their names which is quite unusual but also said a lot of names that meant nothing to me.

The only things that were truly accurate and either incredible guesses or he was somehow communicating with the dead were:

1. he was speaking about a relative who had a very specific and unusual speech pattern and he relayed the message in that speech pattern.

2. my closest relative and I agreed a symbol before her death that would send me as proof of life after death. It's incredibly specific and we told no one else. Just as I was really doubting this medium and saying in my head 'this is bullshit. If it was really her she'd tell me what we agreed' he said 'she says what about the X?'

I have to admit it hit me like a punch and I couldn't believe he said it but I still left the reading feeling like most of it was generic and if he really had my two relatives there with him they would have said far more insightful smart things as they were both very smart insightful people.

I'd like to be open to the possibility but I'm still waiting for real proof.
And I think most good mediums are excellent cold readers. But I don't have an explanation for the accuracy of the speech pattern and the symbol.

No. And a recent experience with a well regarded medium has compounded that view. Interestingly some of my friends were convinced she had their loved ones on the line…. But she used the exact same tactics and wording and prompts with me after them and it didn’t fit my background (my background isn’t obvious, I look exactly like my friends) at all so she was clearly reading the social cues. Disappointing.

Going by your username - you must be away with them to believe you can speak with the dead.

Prove me wrong

I keep a corner of my mind open to the unexpected. At various points in history we have believed ourselves rational and to have ruled out various outlandish ideas that turned out to be true.

People do seem to search for something more.

The brain is an extraordinary organ we haven’t explored yet- some of the stuff it does is pretty phenomenal. People’s weirder experiences could be the brain creating sense where there is none, or it could be the brain doing things we think aren’t possible.

I think some people can access extraordinary intuition when they are in a meditative state- either accessing and connecting knowledge they didn’t realise they had or possibly- just maybe- accessing information from others around them/the environment.

There could be entirely science based rational weirdness we haven’t explored yet, or total woo stuff. I don’t think we can tell.

Where have you been researching?

Hopefully not using that wind website that has flawed research?

I went to a clairvoyant evening with my mum years ago. 99% was just bs, the usual corny stuff that someone is guaranteed to fall for.
A man stopped me and told me he needed to tell me something - he told me to be careful of a man I worked with and named him, mentioned a rare physical issue he had so I knew exactly who he meant. A few days later what he warned me about did happen. Obviously I didn't give the man any encouragement, just said thanks but I didn't know the person he was talking about (am always wary of scams).

There was no expectation of payment, no touting for business etc. My mum asked the organisers who told her the man was very in demand as a medium but was ill so rarely did readings and it wasn't possible to book in with him. We didn't see him approaching other people either so he had nothing to gain from it.

When my mum divorced my dad when I was little, she got sucked into the spiritualist church and dragged us on lots of clairvoyant evenings. They talked absolute bollocks and my mum lapped up every word. This left me assuming that clairvoyants are all charlatans, but the example above did make me question things and I'm more open to the possibility that there are a handful that really do have some sort of ability. I haven't bothered to go back since.

I also saw a medium when I was 18 and had just met the man who I ended up marrying and later divorcing. She told me that my dead grandparents didn't like my boyfriend and he was a limpet who would drag me down, ruin my confidence and they thought I should get rid of him asap. Oh how I wish I'd been susceptible then 😂. 15yrs it took to get rid of that limpet and he took most of my money with him in the divorce.

If some mediums were real couldn't they produce a list of the fake ones? Dead people would know who the real ones were. Especially true of psychics etc.

Belief in any afterlife requires that you not know what being alive means.

Life is just our word for the process of living. It's not something put into people at birth that floats away when someone dies so it can't pop up somewhere else.

(And let's not forget that a fungus is alive too)

Humans are made up of the same elements as everything else. Just arranged differently. We're a mechanism that converts air, water and food into cells and energy until we stop.

We're just like a mechanical clock. It ticks until it stops, but is still the same clock. Just a stopped clock. A human can be resuscitated because nothing has left the body. It has just stopped like the clock.

If you believe humans have an afterlife you should also believe that clocks and toasters do. And why not? What did your toaster do to deserve being eternally dead?

Actually my new toaster tripped the circuit breakers so that little bugger is going straight to the fiery pits of hell.

[Gives phone a stern look] "and I'm keeping an eye on you too!"

Imagine walking round the after life and there's billions of people, trillions of insects, all the dinosaurs, all the deformed babies and animals that never made it past infancy etc. I wonder if they're all "perfect" specimens in the after life or they are how they were when they died. So like half a deere carcass with giant lion teeth tears in it .

I do know of someone who doesn’t charge, who has told a niece at fairly casual meetings - not scheduled appointments - things she couldn’t possibly have known. Including the odd very specific thing the niece herself didn’t know - she had to check with her mother, who lived 100 miles away.

People who don't charge are probably better than those scamming vulnerable people, but it doesn't mean their power is real. They may genuinely believe in it or they might do it for the sense of power.

If these meetings were casual is that because you or your niece knows this person socially? If so they they have ways to research your family.

If not then all it took was getting her name on the first meeting and looking her up.

To misquote Hotspur (Henry IV Part 1) anyone can talk to spirits. But will they answer?

I think it gives @Evanted76 some comfort to experience the feeling her son is near, so I don't think she should be challenged by us.