This past weekend I listened to a pre-recorded workshop led by a prominent spiritual and mystical teacher. She was recounting one of her personal anecdotes – the kind that make her lectures so engaging and rich. In fact, I have heard her speak so many times over the years that I thought I knew all of her sidebars by heart. But this time I heard something new – something that actually shocked me.

The story centred around the speaker being selected for jury duty. She had never been summoned before and, as a previous courtroom lawyer, I chuckled at her observations whilst she was waiting in the juror goldfish bowl before being called into a courtroom.

As her time approached, she became increasingly anxious about serving on a case and being forced into a no-show situation to the disappointment of her students. Her case was a man who was being accused of lying about his injuries to his insurance company. And as things began to unfold, she felt that she needed to do whatever was necessary to ensure her exclusion even if she would have to “wash her mouth out with soap afterwards” (her words).

During voir dire, she told the lawyers that by occupation she was hired by doctors to evaluate the conditions of their patients. They asked if she was a doctor. She said no. So, they returned to her occupation and sought clarification. This is when she played her trump card. She called herself a “medical psychic” and was promptly excused.

I have so much respect and admiration for this teacher. And yet I was dumbfounded – and I’ll admit somewhat offended by her disdain for the term “psychic”. She concluded her story in the workshop by saying that that was the first and the last time that we would ever hear her call herself by THAT term. So, I found myself wondering:

When did psychic become a four-letter word?

For my younger readers, a bit of history is needed. Until the 1960’s, psychic was, for the most part, the only term available to describe people who relied on trans-five-sensory information. Yes, they were sometimes called clairvoyants or even fortune-tellers. But more often than not, they went by the more generic moniker “psychic”.

Or at least that was the case until the 1970’s. With the societal revolutions taking place left, right and centre, terms like “channeler”, “healer” and “intuitive” began to surface. Sure, it was still okay to be psychic. But somehow the field had exploded to embrace all these new aspects of working with that which could not be seen by the naked eye or touched by the human hand.

Then, in the mid-1990’s newspapers began to run articles on how the US Government had been using “psychics” to the public’s amusement and ridicule. After initial denials, the CIA came clean and admitted to the existence of super-secret counter-intelligence programmes that relied on extrasensory perception. However, they were very specific in their terminology. They had never used “psychics”. Oh no. The CIA had employed “remote viewers”.

And just like that the field of “remote viewing” was created and has since developed a huge following. So, what’s the difference being a psychic reading and remote viewing? Well, as far as I’m concerned, remote viewing is more like a designer label that has become a vogue. You see, they both rely on obtaining information through the use of one’s non-physical senses. Where they differ is in the methodology.

Remote viewing was developed in a laboratory by scientists at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI). With government funding, their mission was to develop highly stringent “protocols” that could be used to teach military personnel how to conduct espionage using information about non-local targets that could not be obtained using any other means.

A few years back I was fortunate enough to attend a remote-viewing workshop led by one of the chief scientists from SRI, Russell Targ. It was a wonderful learning experience to be taught by one of the pioneers in the field. But there too was this rather blatant contempt for the term “psychic”. As was repeated over and over that weekend, “this is scientific and NOT psychic.”

In my personal life, I have encountered people who looked down their nose at my move from law and consulting to being a full-time psychic. But I had always attributed that more to an opinion of the uninitiated and unwashed masses.

No-one who was “enlightened” would be so prejudicial. Or would they? Apparently so. And if anything, it’s my observation that the camps of the psychics, intuitives and remote viewers are becoming more separate and more entrenched with the sort of accusations and mud-slinging that we have become accustomed to in negative campaigning, not in sister disciplines.

To be fair to the remote viewers, they have spent a lot of money in developing and testing their methodologies and protocols. But what about the intuitives out there who would rather have a mouthful of soap than be forced to don a scarlet “P”?

I despair at how psychic has become tantamount to a four-letter word. Is it a desire to somehow be more accurate? Is it down to fashion? Or could it be snobbery – pure and simple? For me, it’s not the label that counts, it’s the quality of the reading itself.

Whether you’re looking for psychic answers, intuitive insights or remote-viewing results, I aim to guide my clients so that they are in a stronger position of knowledge and power after the reading than they were before it.

If you’ve never had such a reading, then you owe it to yourself to book a reading with me. Check out my range of psychic (er, I mean intuitive and remote-viewing) services here. A reading with me could bring the answers, advice and insight that have been eluding you for far too long.

As always, feel free to email me with any comments, suggestions or feedback on PsychicBridges. And don’t forget to join me and the rest of the PsychicBridges community in the Psychic Chat forums!

Thanks again for all your support and until next week,

Kindest regards,

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