Well known psychic Mark Edward has just published a book called Psychic Blues, essentially admitting (probably to the smug delight of skeptics everywhere) that he was basically a fraud.
I’m quite confident that I would know by now if I had a spirit guide or my Aunt Ethel’s watchful ghost alongside me. I have looked and searched, then looked again. I’ve traveled all over the planet and humbled myself in front of everything from Celtic priestesses to UFO abductees and their recruiters. This process has been repeated over and over, only to circle back endlessly into the cul-de-sac of my own personal nightmare alley. There’s nothing there in the dark, though I have frequently found myself wanting to believe there are supernatural elements to converse with and take refuge in. Their existence would have made life so much easier to understand and exploit. Still, I have a head start at getting your goat. And I will. It’s Darwin’s survival of the fittest, and a sideshow tent is never far from a psychiatrist’s couch; there’s just more sawdust on the floor.
We used to take a pretty hard line against psychics who willfully defrauded their sitters into believing they had the power to communicate with the dead, but over time and because of (or maybe in spite of) our own personal experiences, we regard the practice a little more generously. I prefer to call it “performance art for the grieving”, while maintaining a slender thread of open mindedness about the possibility of an other side, the survival of consciousness after physical death and the possibility of after-death communication. We do, after all, hunt ghosts, and thus it isn’t a great leap to conjure the possibility that the dead are around in some form, sentient and in some ways still in possession of memory and consciousness or surroundings. We are far less certain about these things than the guys and gals we see on TV seem to be, and typically our evidence for this belief is a good deal murkier than the stuff that makes it on The Travel Channel or Bio on Friday nights.
And let’s be honest – one guy being an admitted fraud doesn’t by itself prove that they are all frauds. And even if they were, that doesn’t negate the possibility of survival of consciousness.
In any case, we haven’t read Edward’s book, but if someone picks it up, let us know what you think.
