Definitions
It is arguable that we all function psychically to some extent. In fact, it is commonly understood amongst Spiritualists that all mediums are psychics but not all psychics are mediums.
Accessing information that is beyond the reach of our five senses is considered psychic functioning. A modern term for psychic functioning is Psi functioning where “Psi” is the influence of thought. (Think remote viewing and healing intention.)
In general, a mental medium is able to psychically access information directly from discarnate personalities. (Think words of wisdom from long-dead Uncle John.)
A physical medium is a mental medium who has learned to produce physical effects like levitation and “spirit lights.” We normally relate physical mediumship to darkroom séances, but the ability might be expressed in daylight and outside of the circle.
In theory, the physical phenomena produced by a physical medium is enabled by his discarnate communicators and the physical medium is just a conduit. One of the challenges for parapsychologists is to determine if theories should focus on the medium as the primary enabler or on the discarnate communicators.
Theory
Having attended numerous human potential classes, years of different development circles and direct study of mental and physical mediumship, I have come to the opinion that any form of personally reported sensing is probably colored by that person’s worldview.
If we consider emerging theories about how we develop perception, it becomes clear that no amount of deep meditation, trance or altered state of consciousness completely silences our inner storyteller.
Consider James Carpenter’s First Sight Theory. I talk about it in the First Sight Theory opinion on the ethericstudies.org web site. If we think of the theory as a function model for how we think, the difference between mental and physical mediumship becomes clear.
The theory begins with two Propositions:
- Sensing – People sense their environment psychically as well as with their physical senses.
- Expressing – People process this information unconsciously, and it is the conclusion of that processing that they are aware of and react to and not what has been psychically or physically sensed or unconsciously considered. A person might psychically sense someone near or far, the person’s actions and apparently their thoughts when they are expressed as intention.
Those Propositions have a number of corollaries that describe how we process sensed information before we become aware of it as conscious perception. Functions important to this discussion include:
Integration Corollary – Other preconscious processes are processed together with psi in a rapid, holistic, efficient, unconscious manner to format experience and action.
Anticipation Corollary – The mind seeks to anticipate events.
Weighting and Signing Corollary – The importance of sensory and extrasensory information is weighted as being more or less important before it is acted upon.
Summation Corollary – The content of conscious experience, emotional states and behavioral choices are constituted in a summative way by unconscious thought.
Bidirectionality Corollary – In this summative process, the person may turn toward information (signed positively) to include it in the construction of experience, affect or action, or turn away from information (signed negatively) and exclude it.
Intentionality Corollary – Including or excluding information is a function of unconscious intention in regard to an element of potential meaning.
Inadvertency and Frustration Corollary – Information gathered via psi is not available to conscious experience but does contribute to the formation of conscious experience by the arousal of anticipatory networks of ideas and feelings. Because of this arousal, their action can be glimpsed consciously only by observing thoughts, feelings and behaviors that are inadvertent; that is, not intentional and not obviously caused by any current experiences. Someone who has become skillful in interpreting them is thought of as relatively psychic.
Liminality Corollary – The arousal of anticipatory networks of ideas and feelings resulting from unconscious psi information may be considered liminal ones, in terms of the boundary between conscious and unconscious thought. Habitual interest in liminal experiences facilitates expression of psi processes (openness), leading to unconscious reference to psi material (and other streams of unconscious material). A more positive, open, secure state of mind will tend to facilitate reference to a broader spectrum of contextual, potentially liminal experience.
These Corollary tell us that our expectations moderate our perception. This is true for even the deepest trance channel or most gifted medium. However, some mediums have learned to distinguish between their expectations and the originally sensed information.
In terms of the Implicit Cosmology, two factors seem to be important in mediumship. One is a person’s lucidity. The Temperament Mediated Perception Diagram above illustrates the way perception is moderated by our worldview. While schools of thought vary, in general, people seeking to develop personal mediumship ability are taught to question the implications of what is perceived. The idea is to better align worldview with the actual nature of reality. The resulting increased lucidity is thought to help the medium better distinguish between personal thoughts and the thoughts of discarnate communicator.
The second factor is the way a person is taught to assign meaning to experiences. Thinking we are our human body means we assign physicality as an objective reality. Thinking we are spirit having a human experience means we understand that physical things are objective because we are taught to experience them that way.
We also assign meaning to sensed information from our discarnate communicators based on our point of view. To be an effective medium, it is important to understand how we assign meaning to what our friends are telling us.
Dead or Alive
Mind is nonphysical, so it makes sense for it to interface with the world psychically. That is the brain as transmitter-receiver model in which the body’s senses are seen as just another psychic signal.
In that view, we are all first a discarnate mind. Some of us are entangled with a human. If this is true, that would mean there is little difference between a discarnate person and a physical person. For a time, we have a biological body and other times we do not.
In a functional sense, average people, psychics and mental mediums are the same. The Weighting and Signing Corollary indicates that development for a mental medium involves learning to manage intentionality.
Physical mediumship is a little different. With Proposition Two, we see that we express our thoughts as a change in intended order. While physical mediums do psychically express information, they appear to also express more focused psychokinetic influence than the average person.
We consider ITC a form of physical mediumship because ITC is clearly the practitioner’s or an interested observer’s expression of intention to transform physical energy into some form of intelligent trans-communication. Recognition of this leads us to say that there are two modes of physical mediumship:
- Direct physical mediumship in which the person causes physical phenomena as an etheric-to-physical effect.
- Indirect physical mediumship in which the person causes physical phenomena by influencing physical processes.
Conclusion
There are a lot of people in our community who think they are mental mediums because they are doing mental medium things. Some may be excellent mediums, most, I fear, are delusional. Our task is to learn the difference. It is not just the would-be medium we need to evaluate. We must learn to evaluate our thoughts for we are all mediums of some ability, depending on our focus.
As always, we need to look to parapsychology and consciousness studies for guidance.
