My Encounter with a Psychic Reader

I am a Crystal-gazing Clairvoyant’s ‘atheist.’ That said, I recently tagged along with a friend for a psychic reading and decided that shedding thirty bucks for the opportunity to psycho-analyze the psychic didn’t count as a too-terrible, frivolous expense.

My personal stance: Psychics are very good at reading people, and at making smart guesses, and patrons are very good at believing what they want to believe and connecting generalized ‘visions’ to their own specific circumstances. It’s about the construct of meaning from an experience versus the experience itself. Coming from a business development/sales field, I think there’s a lot to learn from people in any walks of profession whose success is particularly, overtly linked to their ability to listen and gain a profound understanding of someone’s fundamentals (core wants, inner drives, etc.). At its best, listening is engaged simultaneously on multiple ‘topographies’– from listening aurally (to things said in the content and in the intonation and rhythm and pauses and lexicon and what we hear in our own head and what we hear when we talk) to visually (in the small movement of a hand to an elbow caught between intent to cross one’s arms against the unwanted and the need to hide the fact…or a quick blink…or the relaxed or rigid curvature of one’s back) and on and on.

A few times, I have tried refuting to some averagely perceptive person that I am a very patterned creature. Get past my poker face. Crack my code, and you land upon my patterns as if you found an actual Angela playbook– so formulaic and transparent. Polished command of speech with sporadic invocation of “big words” and business jargon, the use of “my apologies” rather than “I am sorry” and she can guess that my career is relatively on point, and important to me. She can make quick, small probes to test out my receptivity on this point. Confirmation means she can distill that first conjecture into several other inferences, which she sends out, subtly like a pulse. More give from my words, body, and other cues and subtexts, and she is now quickly building out my schematic story– ‘meanings’ gathering and branching out like a veined volley of streams from an ocean.

She is smartly conjecturing that a shine here often means soot somewhere else, that balance is a hard thing for people to achieve and she’ll turn from my work life to my love life, her brows furrowing. She can get away with really stirring up the waters of a stream, mining and magnifying her material many-fold, so t hat I become some scrooge of love lost in a traitorous marriage to the soul-less and material. Her believers can probably forgive the hyperbolic in pivoting back to the grains of truth and the thought that “Well, I wouldn’t have thought it was that bad, but what if, maybe, it was that bad?”

Okay, I am lying a bit. I’m talking about her believers and removing me. Which is maybe more than lying just a bit. Hark to my error in assuming that the nature of my goal (to objectify and observe her mechanics) would effectively remove me as the “object,” in my own head. Damn hubris. Objectively engaging doesn’t mean I don’t end up emotionally engaging. Even as I’m negotiating and discarding various “meanings,” I am getting a bit caught up. Maybe, it’s as harmless as needing some time to shake off the residuals of a sad movie or a bad dream. Or, maybe, I’m having a dialogue with myself at the same time I with her; I’m making objective meaning out of her trade while also, in my head, talking to myself again the way I already do on my own, re-exploring my self-made meanings. And, her crap was dark. My girlfriend’s reading was completely lighter fare. It was her Disney and Pixar to my Shyamalan and Quentin Tarentino tale.

Bullet points of some of her story of me :

I will completely dominate in terms of my career and success. Business will catapult. [Obvious she’s got Angela 101 down. Good area to try to ‘get to’ me.]
I must focus on my work. [Said to the person whose friends & HR department, both, know to spend time slowly easing her into the idea of a group vacation or to just give up entirely, who has regular dreams about Outlook emails, internal CMS user interfaces, and coworkers and clients.]
I will always have very, very bad luck in your love life. [Here comes the good stuff.]
This bad luck was transmitted through my past 11 lives, all of which were lived as men; current is my first life as a woman. [Maybe, there’s a reason why I always talk about my ‘hypothetical balls.’ Kidding.] Negative energy started with first past life, where as an African prince, I ordered the murder of spouse and best friend caught together in bed. That negativity transmitted itself into subsequent lives such that in no life did I ever truly love or was faithful. I was borderline obsessed about power, money, and success. [Honestly, back in that first life era, I’m sure that it was ethical and proper to execute fornicators and adulterers. So, not sure why this prince caught so much metaphysical kind of flak for doing the status quo.]
Past life baggage aside, throw in a possible hex from someone, and a more organic, generational or at-conception curse and now you have a crock pot of dark energy on the verge of exploding. “The ship is almost sailing.” “You need help now.” [Invoking time-sensitive element.]
I apparently do have a “soul mate” and he will find me quite soon. My dark energy will cause resistance and we might never happen. [Of course, coincidentally enough, “soon”– again, amplifying the urgency of buckling down into her cleanse and other treatment. Coming back to treatment costs later.]
Rather interesting how she goes from advising me to focus on my work to spurning the same, many many lines into our dialogue later. “What value to others does your work give?” And,then, I suppose the question that’s supposed to make someone go “Oh….” epiphany-style: “What value to yourself does your work give?” I suppose, a good number of us don’t ascribe too much personal in the professional. I suppose it was her way of turning the light full-on, on my Scrooge-ness. That’d I struggle not to give her back something vapid. [It didn’t work.]

I’ve had 1 or 2 other such encounters in the past (once, someone stopping me in the middle of a street and, another, a friend with alleged gifts), and it’s a similar jazz of tall success and doomed short-lived Hefner-style love and elaborate schemes of false incrimination, alcoholism, child’s neglect and death. The details in the dark stuff got pretty granular– although, later, the friend-reader admitted he had made up it all up. Point is, it doesn’t really matter if the stories are real or made up. We teach kids all the time on how to make connections to fictional stories. Fiction and myth have been used over and over again to understand, manage, express, or contain things in ourselves. We can connect to anything and everything when we view ourselves as the center. So, it’s people understanding, in the listening and seeing, the part of me that’s loudest– using that grain to extrapolate out the best or worst of what I am or could become, in their minds. None of it is real but I think the rub is that “it could be,” and even the non-believer gets this. So, on the spectrum of my responses to her, there’s the choking down a giggle, blinking away eye-roll, pursing lips and…, here and there, for just a micro-second, a suspended breath. The last of which happens when the story connects to one of your own.

Treatment is a base of $3000 for a 30 day cleanse and close-out of past lives , plus some additional resource-related fees. She had some decent posturing of the ‘real question’ being about me believing in myself enough to open up pocketbook to her versus my belief in her. And a clear stance that this is all out of my control, which is totally antithetic to my beliefs. It’s all the curses, and carcasses and none of the self-growing– the doing and being that makes you a liver. How does it count as “living” when you are carried, helpless on the currents of phantom ‘stuff’ and you are a passenger not a driver? Doesn’t make much sense to me.

Still, she could be a great teacher in the art of listening, a masterful negotiator or sales person. she can tinker. She gets it that way.

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