Hey everyone!
This is going to be a controversial post, but here it is!
Mentalists
Mentalism is an ancient performing art in which its practitioners, known as mentalists, use mental acuity, cold reading, warm reading, hot reading, principles of stage magic, and/or suggestion to present the illusion of mind reading, psychokinesis, extra-sensory perception, precognition, clairvoyance or mind control. Hypnosis is also included in this category.
How does this relate to Mediumship? A Mentalist will go with a common symbol, and use that as a basis for delving into the reading. Mentalists aren ot true mediums, they do a good job of assimilating the personality of the deceased, but they lack the actual presence of the entity. The people who are fooled by Mentalists generally find the reading is more of an interview with the "Medium" where by the symbols come out and then are thus explained using the basis of human psychology, and symbology. In addition to this, the Mentalist observes how the client reacts to the reading, and uses it to gain more information from them, they may notice small things, which will open up the client to speaking more about the deceased, which will then lead the Mentalist to "receiving messages" from the deceased about the situation which the client just spoke about. All in all, this is a rather devious way that Mediums have become popular in the 20th and 21st century and I believe it's wrong.
Platform Mediums
This is more like what John Edwards does. He's a Medium that will engage his energy with the spirit world, in a group setting. Now, this is more open mediumship, where by any spirits are invited to visit the place, and the strongest ones will spur the minds of the ones in the audience. So the way it works is rather random. John taps into the otherside, and the spirits speak to him, then he relays the information to the audience and a person in the audience verifies the information he's speaking about and thus the reading continues to become more in depth from here. This is typical fashion, but I find it rather too open. There's some possibility for failure with it. For instance, those who are thinking strongly of their loved ones in that room can and will manifest an imprint of their loved ones. So technically, a mediumship reading could be lead by the client's mind, by their own projection of illusory imagery. John, being a psychic, he's only going to pick up on the energy and he's going to trace it back to the client, which is proof enough that this is a spirit from the otherside. Either way, one will never know because the power of the mind is vast, and there are not clear cut ways to determine the difference between a projected imprint and a visiting spirit.
One on One Medium Sessions
These are pretty straight forward, a client comes to a medium, the medium taps into their energy and finds their loved ones from the past. This is probably the only one that I trust because so long as the medium is in a trance or meditative state and so long as they are bringing the messages first from the loved ones, and so long as the client isn't feeding them a lot of information then it's a true reading. With this method however, the medium is reaching out in order to contact specific loved ones, instead of allowing them to come to the medium randomly. I prefer this method myself because it allows for the medium to engage in the contact and with the medium in control there's no chance of it being a manifestation of the client's mind, nor can it be a mentalist session since the medium will enter into a trance and relay back what is being told from the other side. There is also no cold reading, since the client will come and say they want to speak to their dad, or grandmother, or lost child, there's no confusion about who the spirit might be. The only work involved is finding the spirit and bringing it forth for a conversation.
Of course, I have other beliefs about mediumship, and I have my own set of guidelines and rules for mediumship which I think everyone should follow before deciding to give someone a mediumship reading. These are just the basic ways mediums have read people.
