Steve Sanchez gives us his view on psychic readings and their impact on our lives and thought processes. It is definitely worth reading - this article, that is.
The SRF way is to read someone as you would read yourself. You are told to look for "matching pictures". The meant to look for the faults in your "readee" you might see in yourself. That happened a lot. And what happened more was that the reader felt pretty good about him or herself because they knew the "readee" was at least a much as mess as they were.
The readings were a great way to project your own feelings of inadequacy onto another. You could demonize that person if you like or say whatever you wanted. No worries - all you had to do is see them as you and pass along all the crappy things people say about you on to the readee. Then that person walks away in a daze of confusion while you can be smug that you just dumped on another hapless victim.
Psychic readings can be quite harmful and the way we did them at SRF is probably the worst possible thing.
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I met with the good doc the other day and was reminded of something that I think is worth discussing on Mike’s blog: that is, psychic training as a spiritual practice. I think it is a faulted format for spirituality. I would like to hear what others think about this subject. I will mention a few things I have thought about.
In a psychic reading one person poses as the person with the answers, and the other passively receives these answers, a situation ripe for various abuse whether intended or not. It is much healthier for there to be a measure of reciprocation as there is in most counseling.
In counseling or therapy both people are exercising an internal skill in their own way. Coming to someone for answers in a psychic reading is imbalanced, even though some psychics try to say that they are not giving answers, but that is basically the nature of the situation.
People who have any tendencies toward dissociation, difficulty saying no, or thinking through things, are extremely vulnerable in this situation to manipulation. What the psychic tells them could be useful, or it could be harmful, there is little to no way of monitoring it.
The unique thing about a psychic reading is the nature of its claim to authority. The psychic is supposedly receiving information from the spiritual world that they themselves have no idea who the source is. At SRF we used to say a sort of prayer to the Supreme Being before doing the reading. This is positive in theory, but it didn’t really prevent abuse. We used to mostly read each where it was much safer, because we were all indoctrinated to the same ethos, that is, to not invalidate each other. At SRF it was a very ‘inbred’ situation.
Everyone knew each other extremely well, although actually I wouldn’t say we knew each other, rather we were extremely familiar with each other. There were many times when we would wait to read one another just so that we could tell a particular person off in the guise of a ‘reading’. Sounds kind of funny now but it was a colossal waste of time. We were told to not be in our personality, but that is where people mostly were.
Everyone there was angry, but not openly, it was disingenious. We were made to feel that we were in our personality if we were angry, when anger would have been the truest thing we could express. Everyone was sexually and emotionally repressed, because everyone was subject to Bill’s (and some other higher ups) way of seeing things. And Bill was supposedly an ‘ex-ray clairvoyant’, and the ultimate manipulator. Instead of calling SRF a New Age teaching you might do well to call it a new rage teaching.
All religions warn against the dangers of psychic pursuits. The bottom line reason why the psychic format is faulted is best expressed by Swedenborg. Swedenborg says that those who try to seek psychic perception from spirits in the spiritual world are not receiving what they hope to. They actually receiving and mixing with the emotions of spirits.
These spirits attach their emotion to a person and make it feel like what they are saying is very important, but it is really just the emotional agenda of a lower spirit. It is almost impossible to detect this happening. Opening oneself to it is foolishness. An angelic spirit would never do such a thing.
So clearly it is a messy business that sends a person down a road that it not really theirs, which is one of the worst feelings a person can have in their life. This pretty much defines the feeling of being in SRF, especially when musters up the courage to leave it. As Lisa Lochsted said, ‘we were pawns in Bill’s demented psychodrama’.
The biggest pawns are those that are left.
Friday, June 10, 2011
2 comments:
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I had a reading with a BPI psychic in 2002 and after it cried hysterically until I managed to control myself. I'd had the same reaction (crying like a very young child cries, with the hiccoughs and sobbing) after I'd paid for a reading from a gypsy 'psychic' a few years earlier. Thank god I have a kind of resilience that leads me to question these phenomenon in psychological terms and also to realize, if only vaguely at first, when someone is fraudulent or abusive.
ReplyDeleteBecause of my history (validated by the abuser) of childhood sexual abuse by a caregiver, I think I cried after these readings because of the manipulation and hypnosis involved, which were present in the original abuse. Neither reader pin-pointed the real cause of my psychic suffering, unknown to me at the time, although suspected. Instead, the gypsy said I'd committed suicide in a past life (how original!) and the BPI reader said I'd been burned at the stake twice. Also, that I suffered from self-pity!
Readings are crap unless they somehow bolster one's strength and one leaves the reading feeling clearer in one's mind and better about life. Then they serve some kind of purpose, I guess.
Great comments Vera, you are so honest in what you say.
ReplyDeleteReadings are sometimes cathartic, partly because we are open to hearing about ourself and feel someone cares. People like hearing about themselves. But the psychic format is completely hapharzard; ones psyche is exposed to the wisdom, or lack thereof, of the person reading you. In SRF and BPI the people are under all kinds of pressure and mind control that they themselves are unaware of. The SRF people are under the dark 'shadow' of Bill's manipulative personality.
We have to ask the question, 'what discipline is this spiritual format tethered to?' In this case it is tethered to Bill. He himself constantly said that the progression of influx went like this: first from God, then to angels, then through Bill, and then to the rest of us. He often told me this because I was the director of the San Jose academy and he wanted to make sure I knew he was psychically in charge even when he wasn't there.
In genuine religion a minister worth his salt tethers himself to the Word of God, or, what is the same thing, to Christ, who is the living Word. He is the living word because he fulfilled all the prophecies that were written in the Old Testament, thereby he embodied divine truth and became Divine love and truth. This, in my view, is the basis for a genuine Christian spirituality. In this format, there is no tethering to a human personilty, but to the Word provided by divine provindence. If one is sincere in pursuing this source it will never fail. Of course Christianity has been abusive in history, but always through some human agent, such as the Catholic church when the made human figures agents of divine authority.
Bill used religion for profound levels of mind control. As the commenter above intimates, Bill made us all feel like disciples, and that He himself was the authority. We were held to the same levels of commitment as the disciples. There was no end to the 'rightous' claims he could make on us in this regard. The depths of the shadowy manipulations he laid on us in the dark, are scary to look at.
Any leader that claims authority in themselves, instead of humbly giving it to God is dangerous. It concerns me that so many people reject religion or lose their faith because of this kind of horrible experience with a supposed religious person like Bill.
I did at first, but deep in my heart I loved and adored Christ. I reasoned with myself, why throw away faith because of one maniac. I reasoned that true faith always exists in its purity internally, no-matter how humans butcher it. And others that practice it this way can have integrity, and build community that has real use to others.
The SRFers have, in my view, practically become one with their 'shadow side'. They believe in the authority of Bill. Who wants to get a reading from people who are tethered to that kind of mess?