Higher Dimensions

Our Parapsychology forums member, WhiteTiger, will give free Tarot readings for forum member in the thread Free tarot readings in the forums.

Tiger is a retired engineer/machinist/inventor, in his mid fifties, passed the Mensa qualification test back when it took a minimum 150 to get in before they lowered the standards. He ended up years back on a quasi-shamanic path as a result of looking for answers to the weirdness that have always been present in his life.

Here’s the offer in Tiger’s words:

I answer direct, specific questions on most subjects. I prefer to have the question only, with absolutely no backstory or qualifications to it that could be “read into” for a mentalist cold reading. “Life readings” and the tired old “does my bf/gf really love me” questions are so open to simple psychological manipulations that they are useless for demonstration purposes. Same goes for the sneering skeptic questions about change in the pocket or color of my car… that isn’t tarot, that would be RV.

Ask your questions in the Tarot readings thread. Free registration to the forums is required in order to post.

On the same occasion I would ask you to check out our forums once again, we’ve got a little nice community of interesting people there. If you like philosophical and scientific discussions of psi phenomena and research, join the discussions in the Skeptiko forum. We also have sections on psi ability development, health and alternative medicine.

Marcel Cairo

Today I’m proud to present my interview with medium Marcel Cairo. I’ve known Marcel for several months now through his active involvement in the internet community on the topics of mediumship and skepticism. Marcel also hosted an internet radio show called AfterLifeFM.

As a disclaimer I must say that several months ago Marcel performed a short reading for me over the phone. In this reading Marcel had a hard time of establishing a confirmation for the spirit that appeared to him. After we dropped this and focused on the message instead, I found it to be more to the point about what was going on in my life. So, although I wouldn’t consider this reading as overly successful from my point of view, I’ve heard positive testimonials from Alex Tsakiris and Science is a method, not a position blogger, Matthew. Of course, one or even three testimonials can’t substitute for controlled testing, but they do give you a small window into the type of work Marcel does, and so hopefully will this interview..

I hope this interview will give you a better look into Marcel’s character and plans for the future of his shows.

Good day, Marcel. I want to concentrate on three things in this interview, if you don’t mind. One is your own mediumship. Second is your radio/podcasts on the internet (AfterlifeFM) and third the interaction between skeptics and mediums and what can be done about this. Is this OK?

OK.

Please tell what being a medium means to you? What kind of a medium are you?

Good question. Most people assume that you become a medium because you somehow are driven or asked to help others. For me, choosing to be a medium is primarily an attempt for me to understand myself in a deeper and more profound way, and somehow elevate my own personal struggles beyond my own ego… if that makes any sense. To answer the second part, I am an evolving medium. At this point in my life, I would like to be the equivalent of what Richard Wiseman is to social psychology… a spokesperson and a researcher. I am far from this dream, but I am projecting that at least to myself.

So, have you learned this skill or did it just “appear” in your life?

Being a father of two amazing little imaginations, you learn not to make these type of distinctions. Where does creativity really come from? What is the origin of curiosity? I don’t know, but observing my kids, I see how little conscious control we have over becoming ourselves. I can remember as a child just being in touch with this incredible source of creativity and inspiration that was a playground for whatever it was or is that I am to become. More importantly, I was never discouraged or criticized as a child. I just played. To me, this freedom was and is everything.

But being a medium is not just “curiosity”. I am, too, curious about this subject yet this doesn’t make me a medium.

You’re right and you are wrong. There is no way you can become a really good medium without curiosity. Curiosity is a cousin to trust. Curiosity allows you to peek into the dark room knowing that there is a chance you may get swallowed up. Somewhere on the path, I met a traveling angel. I feel that I was hand picked to be mentored. Not because I was gifted in anyway, but because I exhibited a willingness to struggle in my curiosity.

My mother is really the key to everything. If anyone can claim any credit to nurturing this skill in me, she is the one who wins the trophy. She is a doctor and a great mind. Though I often disagree with her conclusions, she embodied what the scientific method and the skeptical mind should be – open observers and willing participants in the quest for truth.

My mom created an environment in my house which many family and neighbors criticized – a circus of geniuses and freaks constantly streaming in and out of my house. Some of those people would sit around the dinner table talking about consciousness, magic numbers, UFO’s, Atlantis, spiritual contact, etc… I wanted to be like these people… aware of mysteries.

My curiosity and desire, magnified by my environment, unleashed a flood of spiritual contact that almost drove me mad as a 9 year old child.

How does mediumship affect your own life? Whether and how do you use these abilities for you own good?

Paranormal review reports a story about two independent mediums successfully pointing to the whereabouts of a British soldier, Blake Hartley, who went missing about 3 years ago, in France. The mediums, Gordon Smith and Dennis McKenzie, were asked to work on the case by the mother, after Blake disappeared during an army expedition to France.

Both mediums, Gordon Smith first, and McKenzie second, told the mother that Blake was dead and pointed to a section of a river near the place of his disappearance as to where he would be found. McKenzie even traced back the events of Blake’s last night, his path to the river, his nightclub events at that day and more.

Gordon Smith, when telling where to look for Blake, narrowed the search by referencing a weir on the river, 60 kilometers below the point where he disappeared. He also predicted that the remain would be found later, around 3rd anniversary of his disappearance.

Some local, moved by the story and knowing the river, searched the area of the weir for several months, and on 30 December 2006, they have recovered some human remains which proved to be Blake’s in a DNA test.

“It was found in exactly the kind of area Gordon had described,” Sally reveals in Gordon’s book, Life Changing Messages. “Annoyingly, it was found just a few yards further south of the place where every search that we had conducted had ended, just downstream of a bridge that denotes the beginning of the torrent, where, according to the police, bodies do not get caught up!”

Unfortunately, the recovery of the body didn’t lead to the discovery of the reason of his death. Was it an accident or a murder still remain in the realm of the unknown.

Michael Tymn writes an interesting blog. Most his articles deal with the subject of life after death, mediumship, etc. His latest post on the blog deals with the question of why do mediums struggle with names during a reading. Frankly, I thought of this myself. It seems that mediums can know very good some complicated details of your life, yet can’t properly name you relatives. Sometimes they’ll just offer the first letter or two. He explores several cases, incuding an answer channelled trough a medium:

Etta (the spirit) also explained to her brother that it was much easier to send ideas to Feda (spirit guide of the trans medium) than it was to send words. She said that she could not get her husband’s name, Whitfield, through Feda. “Is it not strange that I cannot say my husband’s name?” she communicated. “I can feel it, but cannot say it; that is, I cannot get it spoken. I get it on the surface, so to speak, but cannot get it into the medium’s mind.” At a sitting four months later, Etta again attempted to get her husband’s name through, but only succeeded in getting Feda to say to say, “Wh-, Whi-, Wht-.”

Etta further told her brother that the more she tried to think on the name, the more difficult it was to get it through the medium’s brain, adding that she could not control the medium’s power of expression. “One may get a word into her mind and yet be unable to make her express it,” she explained. “Because it is in the mind it does not follow that her brain will take it. Unless the ideas in the mind are tapped on to the actual brain one cannot express them.”

This also reminds me what medium Marcel Cairo told that it looks to him that the spirits use medium’s mind to communicate, using his worldview. And that’s it’s not a clear text, rather ideas. Interesting read.

Paranormal review reports that police in Portugal has confirmed that they are following up leads by psychic in their search for Madeleine McCann, who disappeared in the country four weeks ago.

Three British psychics, all of who claim previous successes in such cases, flew to Portugal in order to be closer to the place of the event. This, in their opinion, will help them to “sense” better information. The three psychic mediums are: Amanda Hart, Ben Murphy and Diane Lazarus.

The article then cites a long report from Amanda Hart, where she describes her vision if Madeleine, her abductors and whereabouts, including such claims that her hair was cut like a boy, that there’s a woman and two men involved in the kidnapping and that she gets two locations, one Mombassa and other Amsterdam. She furthermore describes the countryside where the child is held.

I have recently wrote about Sharon Neill, a psychic medium, also from the UK, who helps the police in lost people cases. It will be interesting to see how this story will progress from here and if she will be close to the truth or be like Sylvia Browne in her famous false prediction in the Shawn Hornbeck case.

Yet another article by Brian regarding a study of ESP and OBE.

On the Latest Study of ESP & OBEs

The most recent study that examines the possibility of OBE in relation to ESP performance was reported by two Italian researchers, Guido Del Prete _and _Patrizio Tressoldi (2005), in the latest issue of the Journal of Parapsychology. Their study, inspired in part by the successful ESP/OBE study by Palmer and Lieberman (1975) described in my review post, in particular focused on the possibility of enhancing ESP performance through an altered state of consciousness, specifically the hypnagogic state (the state between wakefulness and sleep). Simon Sherwood (2002) of the University College Northampton has done extensive research over the past few years on the possible relation between hypnogogic states and the experience of ostensibly anomalous phenomena (to include hallucinations of a sense of presence related to apparitions, sensations of body paralysis or weightlessness that may given the impression of OBE, and the experience of ESP-like dream imagery), finding that, although many natural hypnagogic experiences may be misinterpreted as being anomalous, some may also be influenced by ESP and other psi processes. The study by Del Prete and Tressoldi explores that possibility further in a lab setting by attempting to artificially induce a hypnagogic-like state in their study participants through hypnosis (this hypnagogic-like state was characterized by deep muscle relaxation, slow and calm breaths, reports of seeing spontaneous images, slow eye movement, and a sensation of hand paralysis). The OBE aspect comes in through Del Prete and Tressoldi giving the participants suggestions emphasizing the experience of OBE while they are in a hypnotic state (e.g, they gave the participant indirect suggestions on the experience of flying away from the body, and words of encouragement to believe that OBE was possible and to want an OBE to happen during the test).

I’ve written about Marcel Cairo only 2 days ago about his intuitive to inquirer (i2i) Challenge. Marcel is a psychic medium and a host of a podcast on similar topic, called AfterlifeFM – Small talk. Live readings.. Upcoming show, today, Aug 21, is In search of the evidence – Science, Skeptics & Me. You can listen to it live or download at a later time. Among his previous guests were Annalisa Ventola of Public parapsychology and Alex Tsakiris of Skeptiko podcast.

Today I’m glad to announce that Parapsychology and alternative medicine forums of Mind-energy.net will be hosting the Official AfterlifeFM forum, where you and other listeners will be able to discuss the show, the guests and the host, thus joining already live and active Skeptiko’s official forum, also hosted there.

Marcel Cairo, host of AfterlifeFM podcast, is a psychic medium. Today, in response to the James Randi’s Milion Dollar Challenge, he proposes his own challenge, dubbed The intuitive to inquirer (i2i) Challenge.

Challenge premise: An intuitive (medium) and an Inquirer (control) travel to a public space in a randomly chosen city and each will approach 40 randomly chosen people (the subject), and each will conduct a spontaneous reading for a randomly chosen set of subjects.

The objective of the experiment is to see if under the same test conditions, the intuitive (medium), can score higher across the 40 random readings than the inquirer (control) can.

Full text of the challenge can be read on the Official Skeptiko Podcast’s forum on this site.

Marcel also tells why he doesn’t support JREF’s Milliom Dollar Challenge. For more critique on the JREF’s challenge by other people, read About the James Randi Million dollar challenge.

I hope you find the challenge interesting and some of you will be willing to participate.

I came upon an interesting story of a Sharon Neill, aged 42, from UK. She’s blind from birth and appears to be one of the more known psychic mediums in the UK. An article in Daily Mail describes her amazing story of discovering her psychic abilities in the childhood and their later development. Her talent seems to be mediumship, contact with the dead.

Apparently she’s been helping the UK police on several occasions of missing persons. She could see and experience what the victims saw, where and how they were killed. She would then inform the police, often helping them to discover the body or the murderer. She tells several interesting cases from her “career”, including this first one:

...Her name was Marie Payne and it was thought she had been abducted. As I listened to the reporter’s voice I felt as if a scene from a film was being projected on to a screen in my mind. As I watched, the image of a silver car appeared, followed by outhouses and derelict buildings, a forest area and a lorry or van.

The little girl’s fear swept over me as if I were in her mind sharing her emotions, and the sensation of being in unfamiliar and hostile surroundings filled me with her dread.

Visualising a place I had never been to was a shock, but to be so tuned into what seemed to be the emotions of this child was terrifying and fascinating. I remembered thinking I was able to tune into my friends’ thoughts at school, but this was different. I didn’t know the girl, yet I had never received images with such clarity…

... Once at the police station, I was asked if I was prepared to go through my story again while hooked up to a lie detector. I told them what the girl looked like and that she was very scared. I could see the man holding her and gave a description of him and the concrete, windowless building she was being held in.

“Can you give us the man’s name?” they pressed. “I can only see initials,” I replied, “C and E.”

Tragically, Marie’s body was later found in Epping Forest in an area that matched my description. A man named Colin Evans was convicted of her abduction and murder…

There are more interesting stories in the article. Sometimes it makes you really wonder what’s really going on in the world.

Another famous blind clairvoyant was Vanga Dimitrova from Bulgaria

Today I’m glad to present you an interview with Erin Pavlina. Erin has started doing psychic readings professionally around a year ago, after life full psychic experiences from her childhood. Erin also writes a lot about her knowledge and stories on her blog. Enjoy the interview.

Your path to becoming a psychic medium is quite interesting. You’ve had mystic experiences in your childhood and adolescence and then you dropped all this altogether only to return years later. Could you briefly tell how it started in the childhood and what were the reasons for these changes at the different stages of your life?

I started telling people I had ESP and could read their minds when I was just 4 years old after a barstool fell on my head, cracking open my skull in the third eye area. I will probably never know if the accident had anything to do with my abilities, but the two events were very coincident. It started out as knowing about things before they happened. I would tell my parents something was going to happen and either a few hours later or a couple of days later it would. I was a very intuitive child and often knew what people were thinking.

During my teen years things really kicked up a notch. I started studying dreams for a science fair project and from there learned how to have lucid dreams whenever I wanted. Three years later I began astral projecting and became really proficient at that. It was at that time I started encountering negative energies. Although most of my psychic experiences were positive, there were too many negative experiences that started affecting my psychic health. I also started having premonitions of accidents and deaths and frankly, it freaked me out when they came to pass. So as I entered college I decided I didn’t want to be “weird” anymore and tried to turn it all off. I was largely successful except that I began having spirit communication in my dreams. Deceased relatives would come to me in my dreams and tell me things that were going to happen. I could live with that though.

When I was in my mid-twenties I met my future husband, Steve Pavlina. He was interested in some of my experiences and encouraged me to explore them again. With maturity came the ability to handle the experiences. I slowly began opening myself up again. But it wasn’t until January of 2006 at the age of 36 that I discovered I could improve my abilities consciously. I finally stopped running from my abilities and discovered I could extend my abilities to helping others. And a psychic medium was born.

Your husband, Steve Pavlina, has started to write about his psychic development about the same time that you’ve started your blog. Who has influenced whom in your family?

Steve began having a lot of psychic experiences after he met me. I taught him how to have lucid dreams. From there he had some astral experiences though he is not nearly as proficient as I am. He’s very open to trying new things so his abilities progressed somewhat naturally, though I wouldn’t say he is consciously working on them. At the I Can Do It! Seminar in 2006 he experienced giving a total stranger a psychic reading and connected with a woman’s deceased uncle. That surprised him. He dabbles in things here and there but he is not pursuing this path professionally.

Steve influenced me in the courage department. He was very supportive of me starting a blog about paranormal and spiritual topics. He bolstered my confidence in my abilities and helped me decide to start doing readings professionally. So in that way he has been instrumental in my “coming out” as a medium and certainly in my success in this field.

You’ve had much experience with lucid dreaming. Although lucid dreams are not considered to be paranormal do they lie on the path to spiritual growth, in your opinion? Or is it only a skill that one can develop? What is Lucid Dreaming good for?

I’ve found a number of good articles about Remote Viewing (RV) written by Mr. Gerald O’Donnell, founder of Academy of Remote Viewing and Remote Influencing. The articles appear in the American Chronicle and the latest one is from today.

The first article is The Quantum Physics of Remote Viewing and it tells about the history of modern science, gives a very short intro into some ideas of quantum mechanics and continues with the usual description how quantum psychics can explain such effects as non-locality and how it connects to remote viewing. He then states that our consciousness affects the reality by observing it and thus we create our reality.

I’ve been hearing these about these claims about Quantum mechanics explaining psi phenomena for some time now. Many New Age authors give these claims, including Deepak Chopra, Amit Goswami (a theoretical nuclear physicist), Dr. Fred Alan Wolf (Dr. Quantum) and other people. And although my understand of quantum mechanics is not good enough and some of these people actually are quantum physicist, I’m still not sure that they are right. First, as far as I know, these claims are based on one specific interpretation of quantum physics, which is not fully adopted to be the correct one. Second, if they are true, their implication is so significant that I my head somehow resists it, I guess. Similar to my previous post (See Is the media afraid of parapsychology research?), where it seems that we somehow disregard such difficult claims.

In his second article, The Real Secrets of Remote Viewing , O’Donnell, explains a lot about the different brainwaves, Alpha, Beta, Theta and Delta and how they relate to performing Remote Viewing and affect behavior in general. He claims that in order to perform remote viewing well, one must be doing it while in the Theta state (4 to 5 Hz).

I’ve received an email from a guy named Jason who’s looking for a guidance. First his letter, then my response and following it his second email to me. I’m also asking everyone to help him as well, if you can. Thanks.