by Tom Butler
Updated October 2014
Abstract
This is a discussion about the nature of mediumship and how it relates to other forms of transcommunication. In Spiritualism, a distinction is made between mediumship and psychic functioning; however, predictions can be made based on the Trans-survival Hypothesis that both should be considered first from the perspective of psi functioning and then with consideration of who is trying to communicate.
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Personality
The star represents our personality; Soul; who we really are. The bright spot represents our personality’s point of view. The diagram on the left represents the relationship between the physical body (man’s head) and the personality. This is the Avatar view in which the personality is always etheric and only its point of view is associated with the body as conscious self. The diagram on the right represents the relationship between a medium and the communicating entity. The medium’s personality and that of the communicating entity are in the etheric. There is a mind-to-mind exchange of information between the personalities in the etheric and then a transformation of the message into the physical via the personality-body relationship. The message begins as a concept and is physically embodied as objective information.
Terminology
There are a few terms that are important to this discussion. As always, the Glossary of Terms provides Implicit Cosmology oriented definitions.
Mediumship
A useful definition of mediumship as the term is intended comes from the National Spiritualist Association of Churches:
A Medium is one whose organism is sensitive to vibrations from the spirit world and through whose instrumentality, intelligences in that world are able to convey messages and produce the phenomena of Spiritualism.
To paraphrase, a medium is a person who is able to sense the presence of etheric personalities (discarnate people) and convey information from those personalities to people still in the physical.
The “phenomena of Spiritualism” are the forms of trans-etheric influences thought to be initiated by etheric communicators. Usually, these are mental and physical phenomena produced via mediumship and biofield healing.
It is important to note the emphasis on who is supplying the information in mediumship.
For mediumship to occur, there must be an exchange of information between the medium who is in a physical lifetime and a personality who does not live in the physical.
(It is difficult to speak in specific terms because, from the perspective of the Implicit Cosmology, all personalities are living and should be considered people. For the sake of discussion, “lifetime” is used here to indicate the cycle of birth in the physical, maturing and death (transition) back into the greater reality.)
Psychic
A person is said to be psychic if he or she is able to access information by sensing the psi field. In the past, this ability has been referred to as Extra Sensory Perception or ESP, but more recently it is known as Psi functioning.
It is correct to say that a person is psychic or to refer to a psychic ability. A Psychic is not necessarily a medium. A Psychic may be able to foretell the future, excel in psychometry and be clairvoyant but would not say that this information was coming from an etheric personality. Mediums are most often psychic but it is possible for a medium to simply be an instrument for communications from the other side and express no psychic ability. (It is thought that everyone is born with latent psychic and mediumistic ability.)
In the sense of psi functioning, “psychic” and “medium” are functionally the same and any distinction between the two is in the origin of the information that is being accessed. That is, if the message is thought to come from a person in the etheric it is referred to as mediumship. If it is thought to come from some physical source, it is considered psychic.
Lucidity
According to the Gale Encyclopedia of Occultism & Parapsychology,* “Lucidity” is a term that was used in the early 1800s to describe the human abilities to sense psi fields such as clairvoyance, psychometry and premonitions. The term has been replaced by Extra Sensory Perception or ESP, which itself is now being replaced by psi functioning.
In the context of the Trans-survival Hypothesis, “lucidity” is used to describe the clarity between a person’s conscious self and personality. This is further discussed in the essay on personality. (The term is used in much the same way to describe how much a person is aware of activity during a dream. During a very lucid dream, the dreamer would be able to direct activity as if awake.)
One of the objectives of training in mediumship is to teach the student to better sense inner guides and to “get out of the way” by not coloring the message. This objective can be paraphrased as making the personality-conscious self connection more lucid. Lessons in the ancient wisdoms lead the seeker to a similar goal, and in practical terms, the objective of most self-improvement lessons is to improve lucidity.
People are considered an etheric personality, which is the experiencer/guide, integrated with a physical body, which is an avatar for personality. For most people, this relationship is experienced from the point of view as “I am my body.” The intent of lucidity is to indicate how well a person is able to live life from the perspective of the etheric personality as “I am spirit and my body is my host in this lifetime.”
* Gale, Thomson, Encyclopedia of Occultism & Parapsychology, ISBN-13: 978-0810385702, 2000
Sensing Reality
In principle, a person is always in the etheric and personalities of other people, transitioned or not, are always “near” us. As such, the exchange of information is a matter of attention and perceptual agreement; however, there are other governing factors.
The essay on perception, discussing First Sight Theory proposed by James Carpenter, describes how current research is indicating that people do not directly sense their environment, but only come to sense what their unconscious mind thinks of it. For instance, you may not consciously hear a threatening sound, but if your senses detected it, and your worldview (personal sense of what reality is like) finds the sound threatening, you might consciously experience a sense of dread and a heightened sense of alertness without know what caused the response.
Carpenter also points out that everything has a psi signature. He explains that research indicates people sense both the physical information from an event and the psi signature. People also sense psi information from other life in much the same way they sense the physical.
First Sight Theory, in reference to our first look at environmental information, is based on a considerable amount of psi functioning research by parapsychologists. With the exception of the part about psi functioning, mainstream science is just now coming around to accept the concept, and you will see an increasing number of research reports from the mainstream indicating this unconscious filtering of information each of us experience.
Of course the obvious “so what” from First Sight Theory is that it is important to know what is in our worldview and make sure it is true to actual reality and not just what we have been taught. A second implication is that people “make” their world according to what they expect. This is an interesting idea because it lends credence to the idea of “collapsing the quantum wavefunction” as we create our world from moment to moment. Finally, the theory argues that we are all psychic, in that we all sense environmental psi information. It is just that most of us do not consciously experience it.
Considering the fact that we only indirectly sense reality, what we do sense is a filtered by what we believe to be true and that we may be actually creating our own reality has profound implications for the idea of being psychic. (Here I should say that most informed speculation is that we share a consensus realty and only create a personal impression of it. This is consistent with the Implicit Cosmology.)
A person we think of as psychic is one who is able to peer farther into the Perceptual Loop than the rest of us. This is because of some accident of the person’s mental functioning or because of training which amounts to learning to pay attention to the more subtle impressions of the world that come to us. In effect, this increased sensitivity to the environment comes from training our mind to listen.
There is a second factor to psychic sensitivity you need to be aware of. Take some time to read Balance and Personality. It is a discussion about personality types people seem to be born with. You will be familiar with this concept if you know anything at all about astrology. Reading Carpenter’s list of corollaries to First Sight Theory, you will note that a lot of how information is processed by unconscious mind is determined by your personality and what you pay attention to. The corollaries are basically the rules for how the Perceptual Loop processes information. Personality type is not hardwired into your psyche and with a little effort, you can change the decision matrix to favor more sensitivity to psi information. That is the idea of learning to be psychic.
Sensing Potential Fields
Every event has a psi signature and every event is preceded by a field representing the gathering potential to occur and its nature. As it is modeled, this potential field is the expression output of the Creative Process and is created when a person first imagines the possibility of doing something. This expression might be a thought, an action such as speaking or walking, an aspect of the personality or an ideoplastic structure.
As a product of the Creative Process, the potential field is characterized according to quality of attention, clarity of visualized outcome and extent of intention to make it so. The lifecycle model for an event begins with the inclination to do something. The actual decision to act may never come and the possible way to act may take many forms. Each possible way to act that emerges into the creative process produces a potential field. How far into the process the event progresses determines the influence of the potential field.
Following the concepts associated with perception, and as shown in the Perception diagram above, a person unconsciously senses psi signals from the environment. If a potential event is of interest to a personality and passes the Attention Limiter, then it will be introduced to the Perceptual Loop. Working with worldview, that process will attempt to characterize the potential in familiar terms, and if that is possible, present it to conscious perception.
This process occurs for everyone but most of the usually unrelated events remain in the unconscious. They become more evident for those who are trained to “listen” to subtle cues from their unconscious.
Potential fields may precede their related event by considerable time. If for instance, the event is an act of war or a crippling fault in a commercial aircraft’s battery, the potential field might be sensed very early. Even a minor potential might be sensed if it involved safety of the person or a loved one.
When first conceived, the event might have optional outcomes. In this model, each potential outcome would be preceded by a potential field. Each of these fields would gain or decrease in potential as the expression of the event approached, with the one representing the actual outcome becoming dominant as the others dissipated.
A medium might sense all potential fields, or perhaps only those that made sense. Since the moment for expression of an event might grow near, only to be aborted by the personality, a medium might sense a future that had been possible, but eventually never came to pass.
An important aspect of mindful living is learning to be sensitive to information emerging from the unconscious, even to sense “deeper into” the unconscious. The person’s unconscious might sense and begin to react to a potential danger but not present information about it to the conscious self. Alternatively, it might be presented in a way that does not register as pending danger.
Current understanding about how we thing indicates our body might react much earlier than when the information is presented to the conscious self. This might be experienced as unexplained anxiety, being “put off” by someone or unexplained dread. Learning to pay attention to these small signals from our unconscious can potentially expand awareness of the world.
A Meditation to Train Psi Functioning
One of the better meditations I have found for developing your psi functioning, and by extension, mediumship, is to visualize your unconscious mind as a vast, deep cave. You as conscious self are standing at the entrance of the cave, back to it as you look at the bright, sunlit world before you, which represents your waking self.
Normally, people learning to meditate are taught to suppress their mental chatter by “clearing” their mind. So let us call this a contemplation because, while I want you to enter into the body asleep, mind awake meditative state, I want you to think of that chatter as bubbles floating toward you from the back of the cave. Imagine the bubbles of colored oil that bubbled up toward the light in a lava lamp.
Each thought emerges from the darkness of your unconscious, and you only become aware of them as they enter into the dim light of the cave entrance. Each bobble is a fragment of thought beckoning you to pursue it to examine the rest that it offers.
Consider each thought as it comes into your awareness. If it is familiar, if you know what it is about, then mentally send it back into the cave or ignore it. Familiar thoughts need no further action, other than to acknowledge them and then let them go. You are looking for the unexpected thought, the ones that are a little surprising.
All yourself time to get comfortable with this visualization. The cave is a safe place, but it is very large and very dark. It represents your unconscious mind, but it also represents a doorway to the rest of reality. Hidden at the back of the cave is a threshold beyond which you are connected to everything.
The daylight at your face represents your waking reality. It is what the world looks like from your body’s eyes.
When you turn to look into the cave, you are trying to see reality as that etheric part of you which is the intelligence core of who you are, your “I Am.” To do so, you must extend your senses deep into the cave and the way you do this is to recognize the occasional unexpected scrap of memory as it floats into your awareness. Assume that, if you do not recognize the thought bubble or if it surprises you, then it does not come from you; it is from beyond your “I Am.”
It will take time to learn how to get to the point in your contemplation to consciously examine the scraps of thought to know if they are yours or not, but when you do find one, then consciously see your mind’s eye follow the thought bubble as it drifts back into the cave. Do not see your body follow the thought, only follow with your attention. You are now a free-floating point of view that is able to enter the deepest reaches of your subconscious.
Work with this exercise over many sessions. The back of the cave is your Perceptual Loop, and it is possible to teach your mind to reach far into that loop to sense the information as it comes from the environment. As you learn to do so, you will be able to direct your attention beyond the back of the cave, through that threshold and on to sense other personalities that are perceptually in agreement with yours. In effect, you can teach yourself to be mediumistic … a psychic.
Sensing the Physical
The Life Field Complex diagram above will help clarify the way information is thought to be processed by the personality and avatar. The Perceptual Loop is in a complex of functional areas shared by the two. Following First Sight Theory, physical information and psi signatures are equally filtered by the process.
Early versions of the Implicit Cosmology included the idea that the human senses took care of the physical information, but it appears more correct with current understanding to say that all environmental information is filtered to the conscious self.
However, with the current model information to the etheric personality is filtered by the Perceptual Loop and Attention Limiter. As modeled, if the information does not make it into the worldview, it cannot be directly sensed by personality. In effect, a person is blind to anything that falls too far outside of personal reality as it is held in worldview. Ambiguous information, the “maybe” solution to the Perceptual Loop, will likely be sensed, but its true nature may be masked by a substitute version as mind seeks to find a familiar interpretation of unexpected information.
Once again, the importance of purging worldview of beliefs in favor of more objective understanding cannot be stressed enough. So very much of who you are is determined by your worldview, and that is entirely under your control. See: Mindfulness
Mind-to-Mind Sensing
An important factor in psi research is the inability to shield from psi influences. For instance, if an experiment calls for a sitter to identify what is in an envelope, it is possible that the sitter can sense the contents by psychically sensing the memory of the person who put the object in the envelope. Research is showing that it is thought to be possible to sense future events, so perhaps the sitter can psychically “see” the contents being revealed after the session.
In a telepathic mind-to-mind exchange of information, the “receiver” becomes aware of information via the contact its etheric personality makes with the personality of the “sender.” Awareness of that exchange must be translated into physical consciousness via the person’s worldview. See the essays on personality and perception for clarification of how a person might be aware of telepathic exchanges.
The “sender” might be viewing an object or thing, enabling the “receiver” to sense what the other person is seeing. This may be one of the modes used in remote viewing.
Path of Information – Avatar as the Conduit
The Life Field Complex diagram above shows that etheric personality does not have direct access to the physical world. Instead, it depends on the avatar. A fundamental concept in the Implicit Cosmology is that such an entangled relationship is necessary for any etheric personality to have a direct influence on the physical. By direct, it is meant that the expression output of the Creative Process is possible because of the association shown in the Life Field Matrix drawing.
Even in physical mediumship and Instrumental TransCommunication (ITC), the production of physical phenomena requires the avatar relationship. It is speculated that a second factor relates to the rules governing the Perceptual Loop. The task is to develop the ability (or be born with it) to look past that perceptual filter to directly access personality. This ability is referred to as lucidity.
