A Little Bit of Knowledge…
A person who I will call for purposes of anonymity “one of my students” sent me an interesting email the other day. She was upset. Apparently after I had shown her a few of the basic lines in the palm and how to “cold read” those lines to fit any person, she was suffering a strange sort of skeptical guilt:
“I’m not sure if I have gotten in over my head or not. I’m not sure even how it happened. I was talking with several people there and we all started talking, we were talking about Facebook Friends and somehow I said, ‘well I could find that out if I could read your palm’ And a friend stuck his hand out. I haven’t ever done a palm reading but I’ve wondered if I could bluff it. But I was awesome, at least in their eyes. I just gave him a reading based on the things I already knew about him, and just general things that are common to most people like “you would love to travel more but just can’t seem the time to go” and I also told him things that I had heard as gossip about him. He agreed to everything and was totally amazed. I had told him that some of the things I was seeing are kinda personal and maybe I shouldn’t say them, he said, “no, tell me, I don’t care”
Other people who I knew were shocked too, and they stood farther away after I kept getting hits. They startde daring each other to get a reading from me reading, but some were having none of that. The went back and forth and I said I don’t want to read the palm of anyone that isn’t comfortable with that. One person kept saying that I would discover too much about him.
So then I started to realize that maybe I shouldn’t have done this, I didn’t want to tell anyone that it was all crap, that I was reading him, repeating gossip and just stating general things. It would make him look stupid for believing it, and me look like a liar. Then it got worse, the guy I was reading just opened up to me and starting telling me all about his relationships. He has never been a private person, I know he tells his girlfriend everything. But we didn’t have that kind of a friendship, mainly we would just talk about small talk and I liked it that way.
So now I am not sure what to do.. I suppose I will just not say anything unless someone presses it. I will tell anyone that asks that I don’t think it is a good idea for me to do anymore readings of people as I might say the wrong thing. People like their privacy and I shouldn’t be prying into that kind of thing.
If anyone seriously asks me, or if they make a big deal out of it, I guess I will just have to say something about how palm reading is just reading things about a person, if you know them it is easier. Gosh Mark, this was so easy to do, he just filled in all the details as I said stuff which just led on to more things. I could have “read” him for an hour and not repeated myself. It was very odd.
Now I’m kinda mad at myself. But it is done and I need your advise on how to handle this as I don’t like the idea of letting people believe that I can read palms. I can read people and so can most people, maybe that is what I can say. Maybe I can give an example as a way it is done..
I could say, ‘Lets see if you can do this also.’ I can point to someone in the place and say, ‘tell me what you see about that person’ then I can help them make general statements about them, ‘they love to eat’ or ‘they love the outdoors’ just by looking at them and explain how we make those general statements. I think that is how I’m going to handle it if it is brought up…”
So we can certainly say in this case, a little knowledge proved to be somewhat dangerous can’t we? Perhaps just this sort of playful repartee is how a person like Sylvia Browne or James VanPraagh first fell into? Getting the credit and adulation of appearing psychic can quickly turn even the most high-minded skeptic down a dark path. What starts out as a fun little lark can transform any social situation into a nightmare. It’s a fine line to cross. When we are with friends, we do indeed know a lot about them, but we wouldn’t necessarily divulge what we really “deep down” think about them would we?
People like Sylvia Browne who have learned how to get a hook into their prey and hold on for dear life do this all the time without the slightest twinge of remorse.
When you offer anyone a reading no matter what you use, you are setting yourself up for an experience that at its best can be entertaining. Other times – not so much. For a person who is skeptical, reticent or incapable of playing that role, it can be an uncomfortable ordeal. It takes getting used to. Even in jest, if you get hits (and you will) you can’t tell them it was all bullcrap – because much of what we would naturally see in a friend or relative is true! What is a skeptic to do?
Well, as they say; if you can’t handle the heat, stay out of the kitchen. This guru-psychic-medium stuff is best left to the …ahem, …professionals. Professional con artists don’t have a hard time at all. In fact they love it when you fill in all the blanks with as much information as you can possibly give them. How you re-package and sell it back to them in a cunning way is waht seprates the pros from the dabblers.
The real question that raises it ugly head is when this happens, (at least in their minds) …is it at all psychic? Of course not. You and I knowm it isn’t, but Joe Average doesn’t have a clue. If you happen to get stuck in this bind, just BE HONEST. It’s that simple. That’s what I did for over ten years when I was on a 900 line and that’s still how I handle my “psychicness” if it becomes a problem.
For example: Tell them about the time they told you about their dog Megs that they also conveniently forgot they told you about. Let them know that facial expressions can sometimes literally allow you to “read their mind.” Tell them about body language, NLP and that generalities fit everyone and the more privileged information you might have “fed back” to them was nothing any aware person who can read which way the wind blows might have offered. They may fight and struggle to accept what you may need to say, but if you stay on point it will eventually sink in. That pretty much takes the wind out of that sail quite quickly. Two problems will likely present themselves:
1) Are you willing to make this type of “breakthrough” for the person …or are you beginning to see the benefits of this power tripping? Hmmmmmmm.
2) The second problem any honest person who gets caught up in this kind of situation usually faces is this: Even though you get down on your hands and knees and beg for most people to accept these facts as the honest truth that was accessed through purely normal means, many people will still ascribe some connection with something psychic to you!
They may tell their friends, “Well, …I know she knew about my dog Megs, but when she said I was going to do something creative like with art! How could she have known that just yesterday I dragged that paint by numbers set out of the garage! It’s just unreal!”
So really, you can’t win.
Now on the other hand, if you want to make lots of money in your spare time…
BOTTOM LINE:Try if you must to see for yourself how easy it is to be a psychic, it can be most illuminating. But beware of the traps that will open up beneath your feet if you dare to become too accurate – even if that happens by mistake. If you choose to let slepping dogs lie and carry on like a Sylvia wannabe, eventually you will have a terrible burden to shoulder if you have even the smallest bit of a conscience. Trust me, I know. I have been there and back and I still have qualms even when I’m dressed as an obvious gypsy parody working a sideshow venue. Yo Chip, Sylvia and VanPraagh: How are you sleeping these days? Are those big lumps of cash in your pillow cases keeping you awake at night? This racket is always new to somebody and a sucker IS born every minute. Unless you are a legit counselor (and there’s plenty of sickos in that business too…) it’s probably best not to “dabble” with being a psychic.
Leave to us pros…
As a favor to a friend, I dress up every Halloween and tell Tarot. It’s entertaining, and in general the audience is educated and skeptical, so it’s fun. I remind people regularly that it’s all voodoo, and they generally assist my reading (as I’m sure anyone does with the “real” psychics. I will not read anyone who seems serious or worried about the results. It’s just not worth it.
There are always teens at the party. I am always very, very careful what I say to them–I keep my remarks happy and light and try desperately to remind them that “bad” cards don’t really have those nasty implications. I have yet to have anyone freak out or get seriously worried. I suppose that is largely due to the parents (again, educated and skeptical).
Maybe there is hope for the world.
i am going to try and cold read a couple of my friends tomorrow night it sounds like fun.
evil laugh
A little knowledge may be dangerous, but nowhere near as dangerous as knowing nothing. If more people understood the tricks used by Sylvia Browne, van Praagh, John Edward, etc, there would be far fewer people to dupe.
That e-mail message certainly made interesting reading. I wonder, Mark, if you have seen the episode of South Park in which the boy Stan learns the techniques of cold reading from a book and demonstrates them while explaining each trick immediately after he has done it, but can’t get people to believe that he is not psychic!
By the way, you might want to correct the phrase “without the slightest tinge of remorse”: I think you mean “twinge” rather than “tinge” (a sensation, not a coloring).
I think the real problem here is that the “palmist” didn’t immediately fess up. Time can always make a lie bigger. In general though, i think this kind of thing is an excellent teaching experience. If everyone had an encounter with a “fake” palmist who explained their methods, a lot less people would fall for this crap.
I am conducting an experiment with something very similar. In the wake of all the Sylvia Browne mess on here, I decided it was necessary for someone to look at the situation from a more objective perspective. So I decided to evaluate the veracity of Sylvia’s claims by examining several years of her predictions and calculating her rate of accuracy.
(I know that several people have done this, or attempted to do this, but unfortunately their methodology was flawed. They marked correct predictions as wrong because it was possible for her to have extrapolated the conclusion using foreknowledge, such as ‘Nicole Ritchie will be hospitalized’. Unfortunately, there’s no way to prove that Sylvia did this, and science is about proof. BTW- even counting those predictions as correct, Sylvia still had a pathetic rate of accuracy so I am not sure why anyone would have padded the data)
Anyways- I digress. There was no control group to compare the percentage with, and that bothered me, so I asked several friends to serve as the control group, (I participated as a member of the control group too) and made no-so-psychic predictions and posted them on Dumbosity. One girl entirely missed the point and asked me if I really thought I was psychic enough to predict the future. I started to wonder if I had really had thought this through, and it became obvious how easy it would be to trick yourself into believing you were psychic.
A previous experiment, where I evaluated the likelihood that an average “non-psychic” person could guess a random zodiac sign had similar results. The highest scoring person started wondering if she wasn’t in fact psychic.
The best way to combat that is to be honest and say ‘there’s no way in hell I’m psychic, and neither are you.” Not everyone wants to believe that… I don’t blame them. No one should ever simply BELIEVE you because you say you’re telling the truth. Try an experiment to demonstrate how prediction is a fabrication, explain the process of cold reading, ect. Eventually your subject is bound to feel stupid: better sooner than later, and better they feel stupid with you for free, then with a psychic for $50.
Back when I was single, I did a card trick in a diner for a cute waitress. She was really impressed and asked me if I was psychic and if I would read her palm. Wanting to hold hands with a pretty girl, I told her I did and proceeded to do my best at throwing Barnum statements and vague guesses her way (money problems, a trip planned, one lost love that she couldn’t get over, yet another great love to come..) It was all crap. I wound up getting her phone number and I called her. Even though she was pretty and seemed to be interested in me, when I called I found her to be a horrible conversationalist and I didn’t enjoy talking to her, that coupled with her belief in palmistry and I knew I needed to throw her number away.
Since then I’ve stayed clear of the dark side.
What’s her phone number?
Ugh… I know all about this. I did whatshisname’s levitation trick (an apparently very convincing trick that really makes it look to a passerby like you’re floating ten centimeters or more in the air) in a hallway at my school, and a classmate saw me and had a look of utter shock on her face.
To this day, I wish I could go back to that moment and do things a bit differently, ’cause I’m afraid she might think she has hallucinated or something, and I really want to tell her what ACTUALLY happened.
Reading palms, or reading people?
We as humans are constantly ‘reading’ people.
We do it instinctively.
We make some basic unconscious ‘decisions’ about people. Without speaking!!
We forget I think that we are animals. Before language there was the knowledge of survival transmitted at the moment of conception, coupled with the capacity to ‘learn’ survival from adult animals as we grew.
Our survival has depended upon identifying threat or support, fight or flight, in an instant. Non verbal, unconscious decisions.
Our tribal ‘instincts’ remain hence our pecking orders. There are leaders and followers.
Humans are about power and space. Control of other humans. Control or management of their environment for survival of the species, in particular, themselves through their own family.
I think that people pick up on many body language signals unconsciously. There are those who have made a conscious study of body language. Eyes in particular.
So, depending upon what your intention, your ‘super objective’ is, when you meet some stranger, or someone you know, or a member of family, a whole lot of mental assessments, decisions, etc. are made on non verbal levels which eventually bubble up in ‘clumsy’or clever verbal conversation. Hence, hits and misses, and a whole lot of lying, on both sides.
There is a dramatic truth which actors search for in each scene of a play or movie. In turn, as an audience we make decisions in silence as to whether we believe this or that actor achieves the ‘truth’ for us or not.
We suspend disbelief and allow for this strange ‘state’ of our being in the absorption of the story with the objective to believe that this or that actor is so good at ‘beleiving’ in what they are doing or saying themselves that we are willingly convinced that this actor is actually saying or doing whatever, for real!!!
But not really, because if we saw that an actor actually hit another and caused real injury we are repulsed.
But we are not repulsed when we see this happen in the boxing ring because we expect that one boxer will knock the other senseless.
We can watch a war movie and emerge relatively unscathed and yet spend a short time in a real war and be permanently damaged psychologically from what we see.
We know, sometimes, what is real and what is not, but we can deceive ourselves deliberately when we chose to. Something is, because we want it to be. We love a good story.
We are such a complex animal.
We are all fascinated with people. People who can make us laugh, make us cry, lead us politically, inspire us with rhetoric, cure our ills, talk to our departed friends or family, and tell our fortunes.
Some people are ready to suspend disbelief for some things, but are also cynical and suspicious about other things while still being totally gullible for yet other things!!!!
Some people want to know what was behind the magic, others are content to be mystified and to remain in a state of amazement.
I am fascinated by Edwards. Because, I am amazed at the fact that he is, like any good ‘con man’, in a state of total belief in what he is saying, at the time. We are witnessing a stream of consciousness technique, which is well practiced, and very entertaining.
Its all about the story and Edwards believes it, Jesus believed it, Adolf Hitler and Stalin believed it, and they all had their followers. And their enemies.
Whether God exists, or spirits, or the ability to tell fortunes, is less important than the human belief attached to this or that proposition. It is belief which has the power for good or evil. It doesn’t matter if there is or is not a God.
The laws of nature will sort out fact from fiction ultimately.
The challenge for some is to discover those laws. For there, is some real excitement and adventure. A real story to be told.