Stigmatized for Belief in Mediumship
Do we need new terms to move forward?
Have you felt people recoil at your use of the words psychic and medium?
Have people shamed you or treated you differently because of your affinity with these concepts? Approximately half the people who hear these words find them to be synonymous with charlatan and fraud.
These checkered labels prevent these very real abilities from being taken seriously by science.
Additionally, they are clumsy and inaccurate, and they don’t fully capture the scope and meaning of humanity’s blossoming empathic / intuitive abilities.
These abilities need a fresh start and a new label. They are desperately in need of a rebranding.
It is well-known that research containing the terms psychic and medium will struggle to get funded by all but a few academic institutions. Research featuring the term phenomenological empathy may fare a little better.
Phenomenology means the philosophical study of the contents of consciousness.
The contents of your consciousness include all your life experiences, your memories, your feelings, your hopes and dreams, language, your imagination, everyone you’ve ever known and loved, the colour red, that man over there, the texture of the seat underneath you, and that dream you had about being naked on stage. The contents of your consciousness are what it is like to be you.
It has long been thought that this realm of first-person experience is completely private to you - that it is subjective and inaccessible to anyone else. Imagine you and your friend go to an afterlife symposium together. You sit side-by-side watching and listening to a captivating speaker. Afterwards, you have a discussion over coffee about what each of you took from the talk. Your friend might remember ‘A, B, C’, of which you have no recollection, whilst you were more struck by ‘X, Y, Z’, which went completely over your friend’s head. Has this ever happened to you?
This is an example of how your first-person experience of the world is unique and private to you. But what if we are evolving such that the ‘locked-off’, private worlds of our minds are unlocking?
What if the phenomenology of you was never ‘locked off’ in your head, or in your mind, to begin with? Perhaps what makes you you was always there to be known, but ancient humans just hadn’t developed the appropriate faculties to read what was there?
Being able to accurately:
Perceive
Interpret
Use
…And adapt to…
….each other’s history and destiny…
Is phenomenological empathy.
This is what psychics and mediums are doing.
When it comes to mediumship, we have to take our explanation a little further. We’re not just talking about perceiving the phenomenology of another living person, but a person who is no longer available to our physical senses in this current area of spacetime. Our current ‘common sense’ understanding of reality is not set up to explain or accommodate this.
What’s the evolutionary value of this ability? And even if it was advantageous, how could such a thing be possible?
The Evolutionary Function of Mediumship
Let’s remain with the idea that we have evolved into phenomenologically empathic beings (aka psychics and mediums). If we have evolved these capacities, then we must have done so because they help our species survive.
How, exactly, do they help us survive?
Well, for one, they enable us to understand each other better. Understanding of the other leads to a reduction in antagonism and fear, and an increase in peaceful regard, and feelings of love and connection.
As we evolve past fear of the other, we are concurrently evolving past the fear of death, and the pain of loss since these states are largely perceived to originate with the other.
Mediumship is only partly about passed loved ones confirming their survival. The other part is that such confirmation has kneeling power for those of us still living. It shapes earthly lives in the direction of peace, love and connection.
If it is true that we continue to exist in some form after bodily death, then it is also true that:
We need not fear our own death.
We need not grieve as if our losses are permanent.
Our minds are evolving to perceive this truth so that our behaviour will adapt in the direction of love and cooperation, and away from fear and conflict. There was a time in the history of humanity when fearing death was the smartest thing you could do. Those who feared death and took care to avoid harm survived and bore children. We are their children. And the genes for ‘fearing-death’ are alive and well in most of us.
But this fear is no longer appropriate. Most of us are not having our lives threatened every day. In the age we now live, our comforts and civilized structures have opened up our time, and our minds, to creativity, cooperation, and connection. We are well placed to explore the ways in which we are connected, rather than worrying about the aspects that separate us. Now, it is more advantageous to perceive that we don’t die, and we’re not separate. We must remain cognizant of this if we are to slow (and hopefully reverse!) some of the damage humanity has caused to the planet. We have to internalize the whole, and think not only of ourselves.
I argue, then, that mediumship is a naturally selected response to changing social pressures. And the fact that it is possible, reveals the invisible, interconnected nature of consciousness, and of life, across distance, and across time.
Now, I’d love to hear from you. What is your opinion on this? Could it be, simply, that we are still evolving and intuitive abilities are not ‘magical’ but simply an adaptive mechanism of nature?