Why are some people gifted mediums while the rest of us aren’t?
We’ve all met people who have what they’re doing in life sorted. For whatever reason, they are smarter, faster, richer, sexier, more learned, more connected. They can do things the rest of us can’t.
This also applies to people’s higher abilities. Clearly, some people have access to non-embodied realms and are able to channel knowledge regarding what is going on. I’m thinking of the many mediums who connect the grieving to their non-embodied loved ones. And of Jane Roberts, her husband Robert and Seth, whose channelling opened the floodgates for numerous other
Why do some people end up being mediums or channellers? Are they special in some way? Are they privileged?
How does this come about? How is that some people have spiritual or psychic abilities that are clearly beyond the norm? Is it a gift? And is there a price to pay in having such gifts?
Curious, I asked my guides about this.
The guides’ thoughts on mediumship
“Nothing comes for free.” When people say this they are usually thinking there is a cost to what someone gets, that a privileged person is getting a free ride now but there will be a price to pay later. Often this saying is offered without knowledge of the life situation of the person being talked about, and particularly without knowledge of how that person came by what appears to be something that was freely given to them.
We observe that envy often lies behind such claims, or, alternatively, the feeling that life is unfair, which itself derives from the claimant’s sense of inferiority.
Our position is that in reality nothing is given freely. If one person has what others do not it has been earned. And there is not so much a cost involved, or a price to pay, as a responsibility to be discharged. We will explain what we mean by all this in relation to mediums.
Mediums perceive or sense things that others don’t. Their perceptions result from being able to function like a window. Information passes into them from beyond, or passes through them into what exists beyond the physical. What sort of information? This is where we need to differentiate between forms of mediumship.
Some mediums can communicate with the deceased, for example by passing information between living and deceased family members who remain concerned about one another. This is one of the most common forms of mediumship, but other forms are just as common. For example, clairvoyance, when a person receives information about an event in advance of it occurring. Or spiritual healing, when a medium facilitates the passing of healing energy to a sick person from an external spiritual source. Or telepathy or intuitive insight, when a person receives a thought or emotional impression that arrives via perceptions that are not sense-based and that informs them of something they didn’t previously know.
Telepathy and intuitive insights are experienced by almost everyone at some time in their life, apparently accidentally and unplanned, and so are a surprise when they occur. While they are experienced as eruptions into everyday physical awareness, they are actually experienced energetically, via the aura.
Telepathy, in which you become aware of what another is thinking, involves information being exchanged via two people’s energetic envelopes, which functions as the medium via which information is shared. Intuitively received information could come from many sources: from another person’s awareness, from your own store of experience, from your spiritual self, or from further afield.
To answer the question we will focus on the situation of the medium who is able to convey information between the living and the deceased. Incidentally, elsewhere we have called the deceased the extra-living. This is because they, of course, are not dead at all, given the spiritual identity who once occupied a now dead body continues to exist after their body has ceased to do so. We name them the extra-living because those in the non-embodied state have extra capabilities compared to those in the more restricted embodied state.
First, let us assert that a medium who is able to pass information between the living and the extra-living is not practising their abilities by accident. They have planned to do so. This is also the case when people who have had no prior exposure to mediumship start spontaneously, and often surprisingly to them, being able to communicate with the extra-living.
Utilising such abilities is always part of their life plan. If people are uncomfortable with these abilities, wonder if they are imagining their extra-perceptions, are filled with doubts regarding whether what they are doing is for good or ill, or if they are very comfortable with their ability and exercise it whenever they can — all these feelings of puzzlement, unease and comfort are part of their pre-life plan to work with that ability during this life.
What has to be remembered is that such abilities are not a one-off occurrence. Each of you is living through an extended sequence of around one thousand lives. During all these lives you explore numerous possibilities available in the embodied state in general and specifically in the human domain.
Human existence fundamentally involves learning about the connections and overlaps between the physical, the psychological, the practical, the emotional, the intellectual and the spiritual aspects of your existence. You incarnate repeatedly because no one is an expert the first time they attempt to do something. Becoming accomplished takes practice. Talents develop out of abilities that are worked on life after life, until eventually they become an embedded skillset that the individual is able to creatively apply at will.
That it would take multiple lifetimes to achieve a level of expertise is straightforward. Where things get complicated is that talents don’t come in a bubble, separated from everything else in your psyche. Talents are just one part of your overall identity. And no one develops expertise in all parts of their identity equally, to the same level and at the same time.
So a person may become highly capable as a medium, freely and easily passing messages between the living and the extra-living, but in other parts of their psyche they will not have anywhere near that same high level of skill and confidence. Moreover, those aspects in which they are less able will likely seep into their activities as a medium and impact negatively on it. We need to be more specific to convey what we mean.
Let’s say a person is functioning as a medium, helping those who have lost family members to reconnect with them. As the medium becomes well known more people seek them out, so the demands on their time and energy increases. How will they cope with this? Will the demands become too great? Will they come to regret having this skill? Or will they become full of themselves, lapping up the attention? Will they experience a crisis of faith, wondering if this is what God really wants them to do? Will they become competitive, wanting to be the best known medium? Will they become snooty, deciding they will only work with a certain class of people? Will they help everyone without distinction? Or will they seek to become the medium of choice for important and well-to-do people?
These types of psychological issues go hand-in-hand with any talent people develop and utilise. Such issues must not be thought of as being a negative. Nor should they be characterised as the cost of being talented, or as the price the talented must play. We actually view these kinds of psychological issues in the opposite light: the medium’s talent offers an opportunity to positively express a skill in which they have developed expertise, while simultaneously working through other related aspects of their psyche that don’t function at the same high level.
In order to understand how this works, how people choose, as part of their life plan, to work with both positive and limiting traits, we have introduced the concept of accumulated human identity. As you live life after life you acquire skills, develop innate abilities, and nurture talents. You also acquire habits, some useful, which aid your skill-building, others negative, which hold you back. We refer in particular to self-destructive tendencies and traits that unbalance your psyche, such as envy, jealousy, greed, addictions, self-pity, and so on.
When your body dies everything you develop during the course of that just-lived life, positive and negative, nurturing and debilitating, self-enhancing and self-limiting, gets uploaded to your spiritual identity. Those traits, habits, skills and abilities then contribute to the growth of your accumulated human identity.
This means that whenever you plan a life, you have your own experiential store to draw on. So anyone who is functioning as a medium in this life is drawing on abilities they have developed over a sequence of lives, which they have chosen to express this time round. They do not have to do so. In their next life they may not show any skill as a medium at all. They may even be sceptical that such skills are real. Whether they draw on or decline to draw on anything present in their accumulated human identity depends entirely on what they have decided to work on during an upcoming life.
Each person’s life plan incorporates working with and nurturing positive qualities, such as skills, abilities and talents, and working to transform negative and limiting traits into those that are positive and so help them achieve their goals. Pre-life planning involves organising situations to make this work possible. In the case of our hypothetical medium, this means that the spiritual identity has planned a life in which they intend to positively utilise their talent to help others, while also working on negative traits that arise in conjunction with their talent.
For example, the medium may be born into a family in which many other family members are psychic, so the medium’s talent is accepted and nurtured from childhood. Alternatively, the future medium may choose to be born into a family in which psychic abilities are ignored, are considered a fantasy, or condemned as the devil’s work. In these cases non-supportive or restrictive childhood input will have been selected to highlight negativities and issues the individual had previously struggled with. So this situation would provide the future medium with something to work against, ensuring they have to make considerable effort to overcome instilled negative feelings and doubt in the process of working to make their ability blossom.
To speak generally, what family environment you are born into depends on what exactly you have planned for yourself this time round. In the case of our hypothetical medium, a specific family environment is selected that offers the best fit for the related positive and negative qualities she or he wishes to work on.
So, and to answer the question, when it appears that some people are psychically or spiritually gifted where others aren’t, it is not that these people are special. They’re not. A medium who chooses to express their skill in this life may not do so in their next life.
Similarly, if you feel you display no such natural talents, it is not necessarily that you don’t have them, or haven’t exercised them in a previous life. It is just that you are currently focused on other things that don’t involve mediumistic skills. You at the level of your spiritual self know this very well, but you at the level of your human self do not. You at the level of your gloopy self may even feel left out, may feel that life isn’t fair, that you should be sharing in the action that others are getting, that you should be having the same fun others are enjoying.
The fact is that you are working through your own life plan, and mediumship isn’t part of it right now. And besides, as we just noted, the medium’s life is never all lightness and fun. They will be working through their own darker issues that you likely don’t see.
The guides’ answers are excerpted from a book, How Did I End Up Here?, one of a series of three, each of which consists of 21 questions and answers. Together they cover an extensive range of human psychospiritual experience. They may be viewed on online bookstores and at www.attarbooks.com.
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